Homes of the Past

Book Talk Admission: Free Registration is required. Register

In 1940s New York, immigrant Jewish scholars sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who 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. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they decided to create a museum to memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO scholars determinedly pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit. However, the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended.

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.

Join YIVO for a discussion with author Jeffrey Shandler about this book, led by Deborah Dash Moore.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers

Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005), Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014), and Yiddish: Biography of a Language (2020); among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002) and translator of Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (2006). Shandler has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Deborah Dash Moore is the Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She has engaged in a number of major editorial projects, including the three-volume award winning City of Promises (2012, NYU Press) and serving as editor-in-chief of the ten-volume anthology, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She has also been in recent years teaching and studying documentary photography.