Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum
Jeffrey Shandler, professor of Jewish Studies, will discuss his new book, Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum (Indiana University Press, 2024). Shandler tells the powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York sought to build a museum to commemorate the Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe destroyed during the Holocaust. Newly arrived in the United States, this small group of Polish Jews 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.
Homes of the Past explores this largely unknown episode of modern Jewish history and museum history and demonstrates that the project, even though it was never realized, marked a critical inflection point in the dynamic interrelations between Jews in America and Eastern Europe.