Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital

Centering the Periphery

Edited by Halina Goldberg and Nancy Sinkoff, with Natalia Aleksiun

Rutgers University Press

Polish Jewish Culture beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture.

Each essay presents readers with the extraordinary production and consumption of culture by Polish Jews in literature, film, cabaret, theater, the visual arts, architecture, and music. They show how this process was defined by a reciprocal cultural exchange that flourished between cities at the periphery—from Lwów and Wilno to Kraków and Łódź—and international centers like Warsaw, thereby illuminating the place of Polish Jews within urban European cultures.

Companion website (https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu)

This splendid collection of essays breaks new ground in the study of Polish Jews and their cultural engagements. They redraw the map, bring centers and peripheries into unexpected relations, delineate cultural spaces in novel ways, and treat topics never before considered with a bracing freshness. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Polish Jewish life and culture has always been regional, diversely reflected in a multitude of centers from shtetlekh to urban working-class districts to provincial capitals. In this fascinating volume, leading scholars of Polish Jewry present original essays on the varieties of Jewish culture that once flourished in and around Poland. Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The 1918–1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Ho

Halina Goldberg is a professor of music and chair of the Department of Musicology at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, editor of a special issue of the Musical Quarterly devoted to Jewish culture and music, and director of the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź.

Nancy Sinkoff is a professor of Jewish studies and history and academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the author of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History and Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands.

Contents

A Note on Place Names, Personal Names, and Transliterations
Introduction, Halina Goldberg and Nancy Sinkoff

Part I: Tradition and Rebellion
Chapter 1: "'A Holiday that Applies to Everyone': Ararat Kleynkunst Theater and the Challenge of Populist Modernism," Zehavit Stern
Chapter 2: "Elkhonen Vogler, Forgotten Poet of Yung-Vilne, in Vilna and the Litvak Borderlands," Justin Cammy
Chapter 3: "Scandalous Glass House: On Modernist Transparency in Architecture and Life," Bożena Shallcross
Chapter 4: "Jewish Expressionism between Discourses of Revival and Degeneration: The Yung-yidish Group," Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia

Part II: Performers and Audiences
Chapter 5: "The Theatrics of Bais Yaakov," Naomi Seidman
Chapter 6: "A Spectacle of Differences: Bracha Zefira's Tour of Poland in 1929," Magdalena Kozłowska
Chapter 7: "Music of 'the Foreign Nations' or 'Native Culture': Concert Programming in Interwar Lwów as a Discourse about Jewish Musical Identities," Sylwia Jakubczyk-Śleczka
Chapter 8: "From Lodzermensz to Szmonces and Back: On the Multidirectional Flow of Culture," Marcos Silber

Part III: Maps and Spaces
Chapter 9: "The Layered Meanings of an Unbuilt Monument: Kraków Jews Commemorate the Polish King Casimir the Great," Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska
Chapter 10: "Mapping Modern Jewish Kraków: Women—Cultural Production—Space," Eugenia Prokop-Janiec
Chapter 11: "Movie Theaters and the Development of Jewish Public Space in Interwar Poland," Ela Bauer
Chapter 12: "The Politics of Jewish Youth Movement Culture in Interwar Poland's Eastern Borderlands," Daniel Heller

Appendix
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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