Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Research Articles

The Memory Work of Jewish Spain by Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa

Reviewed by: The Memory Work of Jewish Spain by Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa Dalia Kandiyoti Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa. The Memory Work of Jewish Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 390 pp. The Memory Work of Jewish Spain is a timely and exhaustive study of Spain's newest rapprochement with Sephardic communities. Both sweeping and closely detailed, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa's book ably analyzes the efflorescence of cultural activities, museums, and heritage networks undertaken by Spain in the past two decades, following the 1992 quincentenary commemoration of the expulsion of Jews. They train a critical eye on the official presentation of what the Spanish Jewish past means today, fruitfully combining extensive fieldwork in newly constructed Jewish heritage sites with cultural and textual analysis. The authors' explanations and interpretations take their cues from Spanish historiography, memory studies, Jewish heritage scholarship, and tourism studies. They emphasize the "multidirectionality" and "entanglements" of Spanish Jewish memory with the memory cultures of the Spanish Civil War, Francoism, Catalanism, the Holocaust, and much more. Because the "work" of memory that the title points to is largely undertaken by the state, with a secondary and minor role for the country's current Jewish communities, the demythification and historicization of how modern Spain presents the Sephardic Jewish legacy are key to Flesler and Pérez Melgosa's approach. They show that the building blocks of today's official philosephardism, whose origins date to the nineteenth century, include the idea of convivencia, or peaceful medieval coexistence of "the three cultures" serving as "an index of tolerance … inherent" to Spain (76). Other prevalent myths are the Ashkenazic concept of medieval Spanish Jewry as an ideal community and the notion that the Sephardic Jewish diaspora is an economic superpower. According to the authors, state-sponsored promotion of heritage tourism, museums, festivals, performances, and celebrations deploy these myths and downplay persecutions, thereby instrumentalizing a romanticized Sephardic memory for national(ist), economic, and branding purposes. [End Page 441] The termination of human and material Jewish life in Spain, from architecture to cemeteries to books, was totalizing. To compensate, many ordinary streets, buildings, and churches have recently become resignified as Jewish sites, including in towns that have had no Jewish communities since the expulsion. As with other mobilizations of the past that overlap with tourism and commerce, the dead do substantial work. Their individual names or glorious lives as scholars or doctors are displayed on plaques and invoked in official speeches and brochures. As a collective, too, the Jewish dead are busy animating the tourism sector, their culture valorized and sometimes spectacularized in performance and "Jewish" dress-up (see chapter 5). But all this effort to erase the erasures cannot hide "the dismal lack of objects" (207) in the exhibits. This dearth, the authors observe astutely, is in sharp dissonance with the institutional narratives of medieval Jewish splendor. In several chapters, Flesler and Pérez Melgosa walk us through many Jewish museums and exhibits. The repurposed buildings, the collections gathered from various parts of the world to compensate for the paucity of Spanish remnants, and exhibit designs are subjected to historicized scrutiny, informed by heritage and museum studies. Chapter 3 is largely devoted to the making of the Sephardi Museum of Toledo, housed in the Transit Synagogue, one of only three in Spain that survived the destructions of the medieval era as converted churches. The museum no longer presents Jewishness simply as an artifact of past convivencia. But the absent story of the forced converts whose descendants prayed as Christians in the synagogue-turned-church haunts the institution, a "museum of converso Spain," as the authors put it. Converso history's role in the present, usually neglected, appears in many chapters, including in chapter 5's probing of the Los Conversos festivals in Hervás and their relation to the memory of Francoism. The "Exhibiting Jewish Heritage" chapter concerns the politics of collecting and displaying in a situation of "imperfect fit," as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett characterizes the frequent relationship between Jewish museums and Jewish communities. In Girona's museum, the authors observe an overlap of Catalan politics with the recovery of...

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Editorial

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research Volume 7 (2019) is an open issue, covering a rich variety of topics reflecting the range and diversity of today’s museums around the globe. This year’s volume has seven research articles, four of them dealing with very different but equally fascinating issues: contested African objects in UK museums, industrial heritage in Finland, manuscript collecting in Britain and North America, and Asian art exhibitions in New Zealand. But this issue also has a special section devoted to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, which contains three articles and an interview.

Field Notes and Reading Notes

In this article, I reflect on the experience of attending Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s class Performance Studies Issues and Methods at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in the 1990s. Recalling the classes and field trips to events and sites in New York City, and the emphasis that she placed on reading texts and taking field notes, I consider the lessons I learned for performance studies, anthropology, and museums, and also for teaching, research, and scholarship in general. Why did this practice of taking notes from the field, from books in particular, and the note-taking practice in general, play such a central role in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s teaching? The steady and consistent focus both on theory and on the observation of social practices was a means of opening up new spaces for theoretical analysis or for a “performed theory,” to use Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s term.

Theatricalizing a Familial Archive

This paper examines a solo performance, The Truth: A Tragedy (2010), by Cynthia Hopkins. Hopkins (b. 1972), a critically acclaimed experimental theater and music artist based in New York City, authored this performance text, one that blends her autobiographical and familial traumas into an elaborate spoken and sung narrative, so that she can become a semi-fictionalized surrogate of herself and of her father John Hopkins (1932-2011). This paper explores how documentary film scholar Michael Renov’s term, ‘domestic ethnography,’ applies to The Truth: A Tragedy and how her theatrical embodiment of her familial traumas expands an understanding and applicability of that term. The paper also puts Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s scholarship on ethnographic objects in conversation with Hopkins’s corresponding ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ installation of her father’s belongings, which she curated and placed in the lobbies of the theaters where she performed. Using the cabinet of curiosities’ genre as a stylistic framing device allows her to inform viewers about a wide range of information, from something as serious as Parkinson’s disease and its potential treatments and side effects to the joys of sailing a ship (with an interactive station). The playfulness threaded throughout the exhibit allows theatergoers to interact with other various items, such that an energetic exchange between the visitor and the objects increases the object’s vitality. As the curator and performer, she intentionally creates her performance and her museum such that the audience must notice how artificial aspects co-mingle with auto/biographical ones. Hopkins, a theatrical domestic ethnographer, gives her performance the appearance of a documentary by both grounding it in specific and detailed things from real life—archival objects, drawings, verbatim text, and film footage—and theatricalizing these truths with her own embodied representations on-stage and curated, interactive invitations in the installation. This work is highly fictive, yet truthful. The truth of her story emerges from the audience’s negotiation of her creative use of familial objects, images, stories, and songs. Ultimately, she encourages viewers to imagine how they might mine, reconstruct, and reflect upon their own familial ethnographies.

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman

Reviewed by: Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory by Walter Zev Feldman Hankus Netsky Walter Zev Feldman. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xxiv + 413 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000333 As Jonathan Karp and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett note in the introduction to their seminal 2008 volume, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, "Much remains to be done if the arts are to figure more fully in Jewish studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines" (1). More specifically, within Jewish studies, Jewish music has recently been caught in the crossfire between the field's desire for scholarship compatible with its priorities (books and articles on contemporary American synagogue music or Israeli pop, for example) and the priorities of the many Jewish music scholars and activists who write about musical traditions that tend to resonate more outside the Jewish community. Throw in the landscape posed by the proliferation of such confusing buzzwords as "Ashkenormativity," and "postethnicity" (both regularly used in reference to east European Jewish culture), and those trying to figure out how to integrate the study of east European Jewish music into their curricula have been more likely to give up than to forge ahead through the increasingly foggy landscape. The recent publication of Walter Zev Feldman's Klezmer: Music, History and Memory gives those working in the field of Jewish studies an excellent opportunity to reassess their relationship with east European and other global Jewish ethnic musical traditions. Feldman, a multilingual scholar and virtuosic performer who spearheaded the reemergence of the tsimbl (the Jewish hammered dulcimer), is also profoundly respected for his work as a teacher of east European Jewish dance and universally acknowledged as originator of the English-language term "klezmer music" in the early 1980s, using it to specifically identify the virtuosic practice of east and central European professional folk instrumentalists who performed at Jewish celebrations. Feldman has long been considered the preeminent scholar in a field that has spawned numerous monographs in the era of klezmer's resurgence. Oddly, before Mark Slobin's pioneering work in the early 1980s, almost no English-language scholarship existed on the topic at all, despite the extraordinary musical accomplishments of its practitioners and klezmer music's ubiquitous position at Jewish celebrations for many hundreds of years in Europe and in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Until this book's appearance, the available literature on klezmer had focused primarily on the music's American incarnation and on the sociological implications of the recent (now over forty-year-old) klezmer resurgence, mainly zeroing in on New York's downtown scene and the bustling klezmer world of contemporary Europe. By positioning klezmer music as a significant component of a tightly interconnected European Jewish system that includes the world of Jewish prayer, hasidic gesture, Yiddish folksong, Yiddish literature, Jewish dance, Jewishthemed visual arts, and coterritorial revelry, Feldman offers a compelling argument for a total reassessment of the value of the klezmer genre as a major conduit of nonverbal cultural memory for Ashkenazic Jews. Feldman devotes over two hundred pages of this volume to providing support for that argument, including chapters where we learn about talmudic [End Page 248] study gesture as dance gesture; read richly ethnographic descriptions of Jewish dancing and music making culled from Yiddish literature; and learn about how Jews and their coterritorial neighbors interacted in constructing a culture that is arguably the most uniquely "Jewish" of any that ever emerged in the Diaspora. We read about a Jewish society whose members were bound together by shared customs that easily traversed ideological lines. Indeed, as Feldman observes, "The gradual demise of the klezmer—and with him traditional Ashkenazic dance—is a barometer of the increased polarization of Jewish society into various secular and religious camps lacking any shared aesthetic vision" (56). Feldman's much-anticipated volume is the product of over forty-five years of serious research, and, in putting the book together, the author has gone to great pains to parse through virtually all of the available literature in Romanian, Russian, Turkish, German, Polish, Yiddish, English, and Hebrew, not to mention an exhaustive selection of music folios...

Scripting heritage: broadcasting California's Cornish Christmas carols

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the capacity of radio to develop heritage narratives around migrant musical cultures in their new homelands. It focuses on two series of national radio broadcasts of Cornish Christmas carols made in the 1940s by a carol choir based in Grass Valley, California. Combining a close reading of the surviving scripts and recordings of these broadcasts with archival research, it examines how the choir (historically comprised of Cornish migrants), and their carols were portrayed to American listeners. Utilising Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's theorisation of heritage as a ‘value added’ process, it shows that the radio scripts developed particular values around the musical material and performers that became very important for local perspectives of the tradition, and eventually permeated scholarly perceptions of the choir and its repertoire. The article thus addresses how a specific migrant music culture was recoded for an American radio audience, and explores how radio dissemination may reposition migrant musics and identities within new socio-cultural contexts.

The Museum as West and West as Museum: The Micro-Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin's Vanishing American Indians

The Museum as West and West as MuseumThe Micro-Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin's Vanishing American Indians Nilak Datta (bio) Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, George Catlin trained as a lawyer and found himself drawn to painting. Having been inspired by the artistic scene in Philadelphia and by the public curiosity surrounding Native Americans, he decided that his future lay in making public efforts to highlight the plight of Native Americans in the Jacksonian era. Catlin saw Native American cultures as pure and static and their disappearance under the constant and continuing interventions of the federal government as a fait accompli and chose to register any signs of gradual change in culture not as a part of a process contingent on colonization but as a cataclysmic disappearance. Taking his cue from the popular Cooperian images of the vanishing American Indian, Catlin's visual rhetoric in both his artwork and his travel accounts in "Indian" territory was similar to the formulaic prescriptions of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales.1 This romanticized version of Native American cultures and ways of life was expressed in the Gallery Unique, Catlin's version of a touring museum that he took with him to cities in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Belgium. By 1830 Catlin had managed to procure the necessary papers to travel on the steamer Yellow Stone. The journey, conducted in 1832, is recorded not only in his travel accounts but also represented in his artwork in the form of scenic sketches. Many of these were later worked into oils and washes in a New York studio for display during Catlin's later tours to East Coast cities in the United States and in select cities in Europe or converted into engravings for the [End Page 311] purpose of illustrating his travel publications. In accounting for his life and work Catlin "performed himself self-reflexively as the only authentic witness of American Plains Indian culture" (Pratt 273). This article argues that Catlin's representation of Native American ways of life, particularly through his Gallery Unique, is touristic in nature because the display strategies that Catlin used made the Great Plains into an open-air museum for Anglo American and European audiences. Using insights from Dean MacCannell's theory of tourism in his classic account, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (published 1976; reprinted 1999), this article argues that Catlin was able to showcase Plains Indian culture by creating an effect of strangeness; audiences were made to see Catlin's exhibition as an authentic starting point for understanding the alien nature of the Great Plains Native heritage. This article also borrows insights from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (1998) to assess how Catlin used the "quotidian" (everyday objects in use) to make his collection of Native American artifacts seem worthy of contemplation. I use her notion of cultural distancing via the quotidian to show how Catlin's use of the quotidian opens up the tourist's view of Native American cultures as an imagined world of process that doubles back on itself and reifies the world-picture of Native American peoples as a rarefied dense "object" of curiosity. I use these arguments to show that Catlin's accomplishments are better understood through his specific positioning of the Gallery Unique as the authentic West and, by the use of select display techniques, the overall positioning of the "West" as an open-air museum unrestricted by four walls. Catlin's tacit acceptance of expansionist ideology has been emphasized in authoritative accounts of his life. For instance, Haberly, Ewers, and McCracken emphasize how Catlin's romanticized vision of Native peoples can be seen in the way he painted idyllic scenes, his own attitude as the savior of the primitive, and his continuing zeal for over forty years in this mission. Truettner and Dippie (George Catlin) focus on how Catlin, in order to make his work more profitable, repeatedly advertised his collection and tried to sell it to the federal government, hindered as he was by the lack of federal funding. Berkhofer and Dippie (The Vanishing) [End Page 312] show that despite the idealism implicit...

“My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts”: alimentary art

This article focuses on cases studies where artists prepare, display, and serve food to audiences both within museums and galleries, and in less formalized settings. A brief overview of gastronomic art practices is provided. Surrealism (Salvador Dalì, Meret Oppenheim), Italian Futurism, and the Food Art movement (Daniel Spoerri) in Germany are discussed in relation to contemporary practices by Karen Tam and collaborative duo Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed. These case studies deliberately harness the materiality of food and, in so doing, occasion bodily, gustatory experiences for their audiences. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s text “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium” (1999) provides a theoretical framework for the discussion.

Polin: From a “Here You Shall Rest” Covenant to the Creation of a Polish Jewish History Museum. An interview with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Abstract This article consists of an interview with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, chief curator of the core exhibition of the newly opened POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among other subjects, the conversation touches on the philosophy underlying the creation of the museum and the way it presents its subject as well as ways in which POLIN differs from others museums of Jewish and Polish history. Its location in Warsaw, both a leading historic center of Jewish civilization and a site of Jewish martyrdom, is stressed. The museum is described as “a kind of act of recovery,” and the hope is expressed that it will strengthen the recent revival of Jewish life and culture in democratic Poland.

Reviews and Interviews / Contributors

Norman Ravvin: A goldene medine? A Dialogue in Many Voices on Canadian Jewish Studies and Poland This paper is an account of the conference titled Kanade, di goldene medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes, which took place in Łódź in April, 2014 as a result of collaboration between the University of Łódź and Concordia University (Montreal). As a venue for discussing Canadian Jewish identity and its links with Poland, the conference supported a dialogue between Canadians, Polish Canadianists, and European scholars from further afield. Established and young scholars attended from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Canada, in addition to many Polish participants. The presence of scholars such as Goldie Morgentaler or Sherry Simon as well as curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett contributed to an examination of both past and present Canadian and Polish Jewish life and led to an examination of Polish and Canadian literature and history from a highly personal perspective. Conference-goers took advantage of the opportunity to get to know Łódź, via walking tours and a visit to the Łódź Jewish community’s Lauder-funded centre on Narutowicza. The paper aims, as well, to investigate how the history of Jewish Łódź is conveyed in the novels of Joseph Roth and Chava Rosenfarb. The Task of Attention. Sherry Simon (Concordia University) Talks to Krzysztof Majer and Justyna Fruzińska (University of Łódź) American Studies in Poland: A Collective Enterprise. An Interview with Agnieszka Salska by Jadwiga Maszewska and Zbigniew Maszewski (University of Łódź)

Twenty-First Century Yiddishism

Twenty-First Century Yiddishism

More Than Recipes: Kosher Cookbooks as Historical Texts

The Jewish Cookery Book, published in 1871 by Esther Jacobs Levy of Philadelphia, is widely accepted as first kosher cookbook in United States. In a tone described by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as defensive, Levy set out to show Philadelphia Jews identified with English cultural standard of local elite . . . how their elegant tables could also be kosher.1 This desire for elegance foreshadowed an ongoing undercurrent in kosher and Jewish life in United States: drive to emulate and belong without losing an autonomous identity.If, as Steven Tobias writes, cookbooks contain not only recipes but hidden clues and cultural assumptions about race, gender and ethnicity,2 then Levy's book offers a unique glimpse of American Jewish life for a nineteenth-centuiy urban matron. The full title of Esther Jacob Levy's text is Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy, Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers, With Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes, and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management. In introduction, Levy sets tone with information as to manner of strictly keeping a Jewish house, including a reminder on need for mezuzahs, instructions on Sabbath preparations, kashering and carving meat, supervising servants, checking bills, and preparing for Passover.3Levy places her audience firmly in women's sphere when she describes preparing home for Passover as a time when Jewish women feel pleasurable emotions at seeing everything in house looking brilliantly clean. She writes that all Jews should feel delighted inasmuch as all cleaning was preparation for becomingly celebrating our wonderful deliverance from bondage.4 Cleaning for Passover means stripping a house bare of any sign of products containing leavened flour (chomets), and casting massive undertaking as a delight can be read as an attempt to elevate drudgery by imbuing it with religious significance couched within work ethic that is at core of American character. It is a notion that echoed a similar book of era; in The American Woman's Home, coauthors and sisters Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasize importance of placid and cheerful temper and tones as a necessary component of a Christian home. The authors suggest that women needed to cultivate those characteristics and make them habitual, in order to maintain a happy household.5 Even if through self-delusron, Benjamrn Franklin's virtues of order, industry, and cleanliness6 are embedded into both Beechers' and Levy's narrative.Levy stressed that her readers should carry out specific traditional duties and responsibilities in their households, each continuing a biblical tradition as a woman of valor described in Proverbs 31.15 as one who riseth while it is yet night and giveth provision to her household. It was assumed that this late nineteenth-century woman would be kosherobservant, despite reality that Reform Jewish leaders were just a few years from declaring kashrut unnecessary. Additionally, 187-page Jewish Cookery Book assumed that its audience would have servants. This was consistent with late nineteenth-century middle-class American urban lifestyle. In years between 1870 and 1910, there was a dramatic increase in number of female domestic servants in United States, an increase David Katzman explained as a result of the rapid industrialization and accompanying urbanization7 of country combined with what Faye Dudden observed as a new concern for status.8 As Levy educated her readers about supervising servants, she was both reflecting and predicting their economic status as upwardly mobile Americans.Levy's text begins with Arrangement of Table, describing how table should be set for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. For breakfast, this includes instructions on placement of cutleiy and plates, salt shakers and cruets, tea and coffee pots, milk, hot milk, and cream, as well as what should be placed on sideboard. …

From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways by Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost (review)

Reviewed by: From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways by Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost Darra Goldstein From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 207 pp. As the daughter of a celebrated midwestern Jewish cook (she was a finalist in the 1968 Pillsbury Bake-Off), I was eager to learn about the history of midwestern Jews and their cooking. From the Jewish Heartland is the first volume in Heartland Foodways, a welcome new series from the University of Illinois Press. Unfortunately, the book does little to identify exactly what heartland Jewish food is. In many places assimilation has obliterated the distinctiveness of Jewish food, which remains alive only in a few old-style delicatessens and at the holiday table. So what is it that makes midwestern Jewish cooking distinctive, or at least identifiable as a regional style? Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost are indefatigable sleuths who have tracked down some wonderful archival sources, but they don’t cast a critical enough eye on their discoveries or synthesize the material they have found into broader conclusions about what constitutes Jewish food in the Midwest. Some additions to the bibliography might have helped complicate their argument, for instance, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s essays on “Kitchen Judaism” and “The Kosher Gourmet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective”; David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson’s A Drizzle of Honey (on the cooking of Spain’s conversos); and David Sax’s Save the Deli. Although the authors state that they couldn’t find any recipes for matzo in recent cookbooks (130), Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible (2003), Maggie Glezer’s A Blessing of Bread (2004), and Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey (2007) offer evidence to the contrary. The volume provides too little context for understanding the significance of how early Jewish immigrants to the Midwest ate, because their culinary adaptations appear similar to those of many immigrant groups. The authors state that the German Jews who arrived after 1848 “were quite like their gentile German neighbors … solidly middle class, urban, and urbane” (26). How, then, were their foodways distinguished? Did they ever share the [End Page 113] same neighborhoods, or frequent the same stores? As for the later wave of Eastern European immigrants, it is hard to agree that “one would have had a difficult time distinguishing between an Eastern European Jewish town or village and the communities these refugees established in midwestern cities” (53). Life in the Pale of Settlement was largely rural, not urban, and the threat of pogrom or famine was never distant. Though the communities these Jews established in the United States were insular and overcrowded, life in them was decidedly more secure. The most useful parts of the book are the discussions of the Jewish Agricultural Office and of the Americanization courses sponsored by Jewish organizations, the most famous being Lizzie Black Kander’s Milwaukee Jewish Mission, whose work led to the 1901 publication of the now-classic Settlement Cookbook. Much more could have been done with the thorny matter of assimilation by looking closely at the issues surrounding kashrut that accompanied the rise of the Jewish Reform Movement in Cincinnati. Overall, the book’s methodology remains unclear. On what basis were recipes chosen from the modern Jewish fund-raising cookbooks? They seem randomly selected and not necessarily representative. Even more important, what criteria were used to determine something’s Jewishness? For instance, how is Barry Levinson’s Mustard Museum part of the history of Jewish food in the Midwest? The answer would seem to be because Levinson is Jewish and mustard is served at delicatessens. In fact, when the authors visited the museum they “listened to the accordion ensemble [and] sang ‘Roll Out the Mustard’ to the tune of the ‘Beer Barrel Polka’” (149). Both accordion and polka are more representative of the Midwest’s strong Czech, Polish, and German populations than of Jewish tradition. Elsewhere, the numerous recipes in the book are said to “demonstrate the myriad artful and imaginative ways in which the Jewish cook might celebrate his...

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust

Book Review| April 01 2013 They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. By Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. i + 411, 363 paintings, 15 pencil drawings, 2 pen-and-ink drawings, 1 lithograph, afterword, maps, notes, acknowledgments, list of illustrations, index.). Suzanne MacAulay Suzanne MacAulay Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2013) 126 (500): 220–222. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.500.0220 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Suzanne MacAulay; They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 2013; 126 (500): 220–222. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.500.0220 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation ed. by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation ed. by Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd Elizabeth Melton Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd, eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Cloth $90.00. 292 pages. This polyvocal volume "encourages us to reflect again on the relationships between 'our' pasts and presents, truth and fiction (and the fragility of memory), authority and authorship, subject and object, the personal and collective" (7). Performing Heritage is the result of the Performance, Learning, and Heritage Project with an emphasis on investigating how performance impacts museums and heritage sites in the United Kingdom and across the globe; therefore this work combines the voices of scholars and practitioners from theatre and museum backgrounds in order to critically explore the complexities of heritage performance. The contributors' diverse areas of expertise provide a unique opportunity for dialogue between theatre practitioners and museum curators, many of whom do not always speak the same language. Despite the absence of a consensus concerning the relationship between history and performance among the authors, Performing Heritage provides a useful opportunity for theatre practitioners and scholars to consider the curatorial work required to present performances at the intersections of visual culture, history, and embodiment. In their introduction, editors Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd draw connections across chapters and situate the multifaceted issues tied to heritage within cultural tourism, history, performance, and museum studies. As one consistent point of entry, numerous essays engage directly with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's seminal work, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, expanding Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's argument that museums create in their production of showing, emphasizing that heritage is presentation as much as preservation. The book is then divided into four sections that encompass several different aspects of heritage performance production and encourage readers to rethink audience reception, dissect "heritage," create heritage through performance, and explore successful productions. The first section, "Visitors, Audiences, and Events," situates the argument within a museum context, sets the stage for the remaining sections by analyzing the shift that has taken place in museums, and explores the efficacy of performance in museum settings. The authors in this section successfully call for variation in the ways people think about and interact with museums. Thinking interpersonally, Anthony Jackson argues that performances challenge museum visitors to participate, but suggests that more work needs to be done on how audiences are initiated into performances. Alke Gröppel-Wegener examines the ways architectural designs produce awe in audience members, shaping their experiences at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and other heritage sites. As the first section progresses, readers discover the [End Page 192] high expectations for museums to provide an engaging audience experience rather than simply making information available for perusal. As Helena Rees Leahy puts it: "the spectators have now become the spectacle" (31). The authors in this section struggle to address audience reception and repeatedly stress the challenges involved in gauging participants' reactions, reflecting the shift taking place in museum studies and the new drive to adjust the focus from object to visitor/audience. Section two, "Re-visioning Heritage: Recovery and Interpretation," advances the conversation by delving deeply into the conceptual meaning of heritage. The authors in this section agree heritage is more than a process of preservation and is performatively constructed and maintained through performance. Marilena Alivizatou's essay, "Intangible Heritage and the Performance of Identity," serves as a particularly good representation of the key elements that continually resurface in this section. Alivizatou questions the authenticity of the "fake" performance in museums and concludes, "performance is increasingly adopted as an important component of museum-work" (92). Anna Farthing persuasively argues that in some cases ethics outweigh authenticity and performance offers ways of "approaching subjects that invoke pity and terror" without whitewashing or repeating history's bleakest moments (101). These challenges and explorations of an antitheatrical bias emerge throughout this book; in the end, all of the authors embrace performance as a reasonably useful tool in heritage presentations, even as they remain suspicious of the ways performances intercede in historical representations of culture. The chapters in the third section, "Re-creating Heritage...

Kissing as Telling: Some Thoughts on the Cultural History of Media Performance

uch of my research has involved the analysis of types of per- formance as they have developed through history and moved between media forms and genres. My experience with that type of work has convinced me of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary dialogue between Studies and Media Studies. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of all the pos- sible synergies between these disciplines, but let me briefly mention two. First, the analysis of performance can help scholars to study the dynamics of trans- or intermediality—the relationships among media forms. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes that, since performance lacks a distinctive medium, Studies starts from the premise that its objects of study are not to be divided up and par- celed out, medium by medium. 1 Second, the study of performance is inherently concerned with process and change, with the relationship between tradition and innovation, between the doing and the already done. 2 Studies can thus provide methodological tools for scholars embarking on what Rick Altman calls a approach to media history. Altman reminds us that nineteenth-century American entertainment was organized around acts and the people who performed them, as opposed to media products, and he suggests that film scholars must put aside a firmly entrenched film-oriented approach to cinema in favor of a performer-oriented position. 3 A performer-oriented or performance-oriented approach has much to offer media historians, but it is not without its challenges. How does 1 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Studies, Rockefeller Foundation, Culture and

Routes of Industrial Heritage: On the Animation of Sedentary Objects

In this article, the recent proliferation of cultural heritage routes and networks will be analyzed as an attempt to animate and revitalize idle artefacts and landscapes. With a specific focus on the sedentary, immobile sites of former industrial production, it will be claimed that the route is an appropriate and understandable way of dealing with industrial sites that have lost their stable place in a sequence of productions. If the operational production site is understood as a place of where, above all, function and efficiency guide the systematic interaction between labour, raw material and technology, then the absence of this order is what makes an abandoned factory seem so isolated and out of place. It becomes disconnected from the web of production of which it was part and from which it gained its meaning and stability. In this regard, it makes sense to think of industrial heritage routes as an effort to bring the isolated site back into place. Following Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, we have come to think of cultural heritage as an opportunity that is granted to artifacts, lifestyles and places of a ’second life’. Industrial heritage routes occasion such a reanimation of former industrial sites according to the principles cultural tourism, place production, professional networking and best practice learning. As a mode of operation, the route has some potential advantages over the bounded, site-specific approach. It extends the historic context of the site in question beyond the isolated, geographical location. Orchestrating sites in a wider heritage network is a way of emphasizing a notion of culture that stresses interaction, movement and encounters with that which lies beyond the local. It may also grant heritage professionals an opportunity to work in closer relation to what goes on elsewhere.

Looking Jewish: The State of Research on Modern Jewish Art

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.Lionel Trilling, notebook entry, 1928I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimeter to his status by realizing his Jewishness, although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness.Lionel Trilling, Contemporary Jewish Record, 1944DEFINITIONS AND HISTORIOGRAPHYSCHOLARSHIP ON MODERN JEWISH ART has developed critical mass only in the past two decades, after an uneven pioneer phase most often confined to museum exhibition catalogues and closely researched articles in the once indispensable Journal of Jewish Art (1974- 88). * From Israel (yet written in English), Jewish Art's successor, Ars Judaica (2005-), is now complemented by the first American-edited journal dedicated to Jewish art, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (2007-). Several anthologies have recently emerged, such as Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd's Complex. Identities (2001) and Barbara KirshenblattGimblett and Jonathan Karp's The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008).2 Much serious work still appears either as museum publications or articles, mostly in journals of Jewish art or Jewish studies.3 Yet Jewish art history continues to suffer from a lack of respectability outside Israel; indeed, the prevailing perception within the discipline of art history does not yet recognize Jewish art as a subfield, such as African American art, let alone Christian or Islamic art. Art history more typically is delineated by nationality, another of the definitions of Jewish difference, and a starting point for some current self-conscious Jewish art scholarship. This essay will discuss such recent contributions to the field of Jewish art, alongside three older landmark books- enduring models for interdisciplinary, historically grounded scholarship in modern Jewish art - by Richard Cohen, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, and Avram Kampf.4General historiographical problems concerning the assessment of Jewish art formed the subject of a 1999 anthology, edited by Catherine Soussloff.5 The first segment considers biases of the field of art history against the very notion of Jewish art, in part due to the widespread misimpression that the Second Commandment prohibited Jews from making pictorial imagery. lisa Saltzman, who also later devoted important books to the subject, tackles the issue of art after the Shoah, particularly for a gentile German like Anselm Kiefer.6 Soussloff's book also engages with how a historian or critic's identity shapes his (in all cases) approach to Jewish art/ Specifically, Margaret Olin examines nineteenth-century art history surveys and their exclusions of Jewish monuments from a dominant progressive narrative, conceived in national and racial terms. Remaining essays on early Jewish art historians and critics, from Aby Warburg to Clement Greenberg, evaluate emerging twentieth-century Jewish visions of the discipline of art history, whether Renaissance or modern.8The old canard about Jewish image-phobia remains widespread. Two recent books, however, have gone far to redress the commonplace that Second Commandment prohibitions inhibited, even prevented, Jewish visual culture. Kaiman Bland, also a contributor to Soussloff's volume, deconstructs the misperception. His 2000 book chronicles a history of ideas starting with German nineteenth-century stereotypes. Even Kant and Hegel regarded Jews as a verbal people who preferred abstraction and monotheism to the materiality and potential idolatry of art objects - hearing and the word dominated over sight and the image.9 But not only racist outsiders, including Richard Wagner, tarred Jews with this limitation. Prominent insiders, such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, conceded this (potentially self-fulfilling) historical truth as well. While the very existence of any tradition of Jewish art remained steeped in modern debates over the meanings of both art and Jewish identity, Bland also shows that a premodern consensus actually affirmed Jewish art amid lively discussion (as well as debate) by medieval and early modern rabbis. …

Weavings of War, Fabrics of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Weavings of War, Fabrics of Memory Lisa Gabbert Weavings of War, Fabrics of Memory. Produced through the collaboration of City Lore, the Michigan State University Museum, and the Vermont Folklife Center. Curated by Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, with consulting curators Marsha MacDowell and Steve Zeitlin. This traveling exhibit appeared at the Vermont Folklife Center, Middlebury, VT (March 4–June 4, 2005); Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA, (June 18–September 18, 2005); Design Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (October 8–December 11, 2005); Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, MI (January 22–August 13, 2006); Puffin Gallery, New York, NY (September 5–October 15, 2006); Institute for Community Research, Hartford, CT (October 27, 2006–January 15, 2007); University Galleries, Dorothy P. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, (February 9–April 11, 2007); San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, San Jose, CA, (July 17– September 23, 2007); Alliance for Varied Arts, Thatcher-Young Mansion, Logan, UT (October 5–December 1, 2007). A Web site documenting the exhibit is now available on the Internet at http://www.citylore.org/wow/index.html. Weavings of War, Fabrics of Memory is an exhibition of international textiles spanning a number of countries and ethnic/linguistic groups. Bound together by the themes of war, armed conflict, displacement, and rupture, works in the exhibit include post-apartheid South African memory cloths, Hmong story cloths, arpilleras from Chile and Peru, and war rugs from Central Asia. I brought the exhibit to Logan, Utah, in the fall of 2007 and organized lectures and films around it. It was displayed at the Thatcher-Young Mansion, the final stop on its three-year tour. An exhibit catalogue of the same title was edited by Ariel Zeitlin Cooke and Marsha MacDowell (Michigan State University Press, 2005) and contains essays by Zeitlin Cooke, MacDowell, James E. Young, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, as well as artist profiles. What makes the pieces in this exhibit unique is that their iconography features modern warfare and violence particular to their regions of origin. Scenes of executions and ethnic cleansings, as well as military motifs such as tanks, grenades, and helicopters are woven, stitched, or embroidered into fabric. Hmong-embroidered textiles, for example, illustrate in brightly colored threads villagers being massacred by Pathêt Lao soldiers. One portion of a South African memory cloth shows a person being "necklaced"—that is, set on fire by placing a burning tire around the neck. In U.S. contexts, perhaps the most politically charged objects are the 9/11 rugs, although they are not the exhibit's primary focus. 9/11 rugs are usually made in Afghanistan or Pakistan and depict the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. As Zeitlin Cooke observes in the exhibition catalogue, the rugs emerged on the international market only a few months after the World Trade Center was destroyed (p. 61). One rug displayed in the exhibit is set in red, white, and blue colors and shows each Twin Tower with an airplane crashing into it, sending out dust or flames. A helicopter rests atop one building. The U.S. and Afghanistan flags are depicted side by side in the middle; a dove of peace rests along the bottom by the letters "USA." At the top is woven "11 September in 2001." The other rug is similar, but specifically identifies the airplanes as "American" and "USA." It also includes the words, "The Terrors were in America." All of the displayed items draw on traditional textile methods to illustrate modern theaters of terror. The exhibit demonstrates how the textiles function as documentaries to record the experiences of ordinary people. The curators smartly [End Page 349] frame the objects as survivor stories, rendered in pictures instead of words. They do not represent the perspective of the military, social elites, or the literati but rather the perspective of a sector of society that otherwise is denied access to public forums—displaced, largely poor, semiliterate or nonliterate women and men. The 9/11 rugs are not strictly documentary, but they also can be understood as survivor stories. According to collector Kevin Sudeith (personal communication), the sources for these rugs are not...