(De/Re)Constructions of Modern Jewish Spaces in Eastern Europe and their post-Holocaust Representations. A Short Introduction

Publication date 20.04.2023

Prof. Karolina Szymaniak

The course offers a short introduction to some of the key concepts and literary and cultural practices that shaped the represenations of modern Jewish spaces in Eastern Europe as well as their contemporary reconstructions and exhibitions. While focusing on (Jewish) Poland and Yiddish culture, this course introduces critical tools for understanding and interpreting modern (Jewish) contructions and experiences of space and place.

This course forms a part of Jewish History, Common Past and Heritage: Culture, Cities, Milieus summer school.

Making Space Jewish: Between Storytelling and Tourism

B. Mann, Makom, in, B. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies, p. 17-25.
H. Bar-Itzhak, The Geography of the Jewish Imagination: Po-lin among Trees with Leaves from the Gemara, in Jewish Poland, in. H. Bar-Itzhak Legends of Origin. Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles, Detroit, 2001, p. 27-30, 33-38.
S. Kassow, Travel and Local History as a National Mission. Polish Jews and the Landkentenish Movement in the 1920s and 1930s in: Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space,
Traditions of Place, ed. By J. Brauch, A. Lipphardt, A. Nocke, Ashgate 2008, p. 242-244, 247-261.

Shtetl – Constructions and Deconstructions

Modern Urban Space – Apocalypse, Alientation, Affection

Cafes and Shopping Widows – gender, body and the spectacles of capitalism

Reconstructions - representing and exhibiting Jewish places and spaces after the Holocaust

Author

Karolina Szymaniak

professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, researcher, editor, translator. Her research focus lies at the intersection of modern Jewish literature and culture, Polish-Jewish literary and cultural relations, memory policy, theory of modernism and Avant Garde, women’s literature and Translation Studies.

Related syllabi (1)

Jews on Display. Exhibiting Jewish History and Culture in the East Central European Context at the beginning of the 21st century

The course explores the ways in which Jewish history and culture are narrated and visualized in the new museum and exhibitions projects in post-communist East Central Europe, and how those museums as public institutions, and curatorial interventions contribute to establishing, (re)shaping, countering or petrifying respective national narratives, the understanding of cultural difference and prejudice.

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