About this episode
The episode discusses the efforts of immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York to create a museum commemorating East European Jewry.
In 1940s New York, immigrant Jewish scholars sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, places, and ways of living that were being destroyed. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they decided to create a museum to memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO scholars determinedly pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit. However, the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended. Homes of the Past explores this largely unknown episode of modern Jewish history and museum history and demonstrates that the…
People in this episode
Host: Deborah Dash Moore
Guest: Jeffrey Shandler
Topics covered
- Jewish history
- museum studies
- immigration
- Yiddish culture
- East European Jewry
Keywords
- Jewish scholars
- YIVO
- museum
- East European Jewry
- 1940s
- immigration
- cultural memory
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Places: New York
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