Menachem Kipnis: Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish Eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in Eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States.
Menachem Kipnis, edited by Sheila E. Jelen and translated by Raphael Finkel, brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and Eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Jelen and Finkel about this book, moderated by Natan M. Meir.
Learn more about Menachem Kipnis in the YIVO Encyclopedia.
About the Speakers
Sheila E. Jelen is a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship is in the field of modern Jewish literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on gender and Jewish literacy and the intersection between ethnographic, photographic, and literary discourses in popular reconstructions of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life in Israel and the United States. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies and Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance.
Raphael Finkel is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. Finkel is also an activist for the survival of the Yiddish language.
Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Chair in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914 and Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939. He lectures widely on Jewish history and culture in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and the Baltics; Jewish folklore and magic; and Jewish disability history. He is now working on a study of lived Judaism that explores the persistence of folk traditions and magical practices in the lives of ordinary Jews.