Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 17, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute, with co-sponsorship from the University Seminar on Cultural Memory and the Society for Senior Scholars, for a talk by Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, chief curator of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewry, in conversation with Marianne Hirsch, the co-author of Ghost of Homes: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, about what the Jewish past means to those living in “post-Jewish” towns in Poland, Ukraine, and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. Moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s opening talk discusses a new category emerged: “post-Jewish” property that emerged as result of the Holocaust. As a result of the Holocaust, a new category emerged: “post-Jewish” property, which included land, buildings, and objects. Defined by dispossession resulting from the fate of Jews during and after the Holocaust, this category was the organizing concept for POLIN Museum’s recent temporary exhibition, (post)JEWISH…Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt, which explored how the shtetl became a post-Jewish town. Original memory paintings of Jewish life before the Holocaust were juxtaposed with post-Jewish objects and more broadly with the “post-Jewish” town as it evolved in the decades since the Holocaust. This project is not only about Jewish memory, but also about Polish memory – what the Jewish past means to those living in these towns today. In the ensuing discussion, Hirsch and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore the afterlives of violence, displacement, and dispossession in our present moment.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. She is currently Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), among others.
Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita at Columbia University, is a pioneering scholar in memory studies, feminist theory, and visual culture. She developed the landmark concept of “postmemory,” examining how generations inherit and process inherited trauma and memories of violence. Her critical work on Jewish memory and place—notably in Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory—bridges familial narratives with historical loss.Through seminal books like The Generation of Postmemory, she illuminates how photography, story, and diaspora shape generational remembrance.
