Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 13, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for the first installment of the Polish-Jewish Past and Present series, featuring a book talk by Sarah Zarrow. Professor Emerita Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (NYU) and Professor Rebecca Kobrin (Columbia) will serve as discussants. Moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
Displays of Belonging illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite.
By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the many ways Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context and sheds light on how ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in museum spaces.
About the Author
Sarah Ellen Zarrow is a historian and an Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College (CUNY). Previously, she was an Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where she also held the Endowed Professorship in Jewish History. Her ongoing research focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland. She is especially interested in Jewish museum practices, language politics, and schooling. Her latest research concerns technical/vocational education for girls in interwar Poland, focusing on a network of girls’ schools. She previously was a Research Fellow at New Europe College Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest, Romania, and she holds a doctorate from the joint program of the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and the History Department at NYU.
About the Discussants
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.
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University. She is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010) and, most recently, A Credit to the Nation: East European Immigrant Bankers and American Finance, 1870-1930.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
