Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record - in both words and images - of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, 'lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived'. This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world - we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a 'black wedding' in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic. This moving collaboration - a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation - is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town.

In a time of national introspection regarding the country s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland."

From riddles to proverbs, from jingles to jokes, from mnemonics to pig Latin to dueling with words, speech play is central to social life in all of its forms. These essays describe a variety of speech play genres, formulate the "rules" for play with language, and discuss the relevance of speech play to current issues in linguistic theory, cognitive development, and the ethnography of speaking.

The seven essays in this volume focus such previously unexplored subjects as the world's first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters, published in 1854, and a wonderful 19th-century Jewish cookbook, which in addition to its Hungarian edition was also published in Dutch in Rotterdam. The author entertainingly reconstructs the history of bolesz, a legendary yeast pastry that was the specialty of a famous, but long defunct Jewish coffeehouse in Pest, and includes the modernized recipe of this distant relative of cinnamon rolls. Koerner also tells the history of the first Jewish bookstore in Hungary (founded as early as in 1765!) and examines the influence of Jewish cuisine on non-Jewish food. In this volume Andras Koerner explores key issues of Hungarian Jewish culinary culture in greater detail and more scholarly manner than what space restrictions permitted in his previous work Jewish Cuisine in Hungary: A Cultural History, also published by CEU Press, which received the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in 2020. The current essays confirm the extent to which Hungarian Jewry was part of the Jewish life and culture of the Central European region before their almost total language shift by the turn of the 20th century.

This volume takes the reader on a journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects - and people - are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. The analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketeted as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies and places. The book concludes with a commentary on the "good taste/bad taste" debate in the ephemeral "museum of the life world," where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converti

In a time of national introspection regarding the country s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites. They reveal that an emergent Jewish presence in both urban and rural landscapes exists in conflict and collaboration with other remembered minorities, engaging in complex negotiations with local, regional, national, and international groups and interests. With its emphasis on spaces and built environments, this volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland."

When is an artistic work finished? When the copyeditor makes the final correction to a manuscript, when the composer writes the last note of a symphony, or when the painter puts the last brushstroke on the canvas? Perhaps it's even later, when someone reads the work, when an ensemble performs, or when the painting is hung on a gallery wall for viewing?
"Art from Start to Finish "gathers a unique group of contributors from the worlds of sociology, musicology, literature, and communications--many of them practicing artists in their own right--to discuss how artists from jazz musicians to painters work: how they coordinate their efforts, how they think, how they start, and, of course, how they finish their productions.
Specialists in the arts have much to say about the works themselves, which are often neglected by scholarsi n other fields. "Art from Start to Finish" takes a different tack by exploring the creative process itself and its social component. Any reader who makes art or has an interest in it will value this book.

The wide-ranging portrayal of modern Jewishness in artistic terms invites scrutiny into the relationship between creativity and the formation of Jewish identity and into the complex issue of what makes a work of art uniquely Jewish. Whether it is the provenance of the artist, as in the case of popular Israeli singer Zehava Ben, the intention of the iconography, as in Ben Shahn's antifascist paintings, or the utopian ideals of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, clearly no single formula for defining Jewish art in the diaspora will suffice."The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times" is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Working with a broad conception of what counts as art, the book asks the following questions: What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals?This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the various challenges of modernity, including cultural adaptation and self-preservation, economic diversification, and ritual transformation. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world--or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world--and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl's words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author. -- Indiana University Press

A scholarly inquiry into how portrayals of the Pilgrims evolved from glorification to more accurate reconstruction of history through performance The various ways in which the Pilgrims have been represented over the past three hundred years reflect important changes in American culture. This study of a phenomenon at "Plimoth Plantation" reveals a pattern created by progressive cultural forces in the United States to establish historical accuracy. It traces the transformation in the styles of portraying the cultural history of one of America's earliest immigrant groups, the Pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the nineteenth century the Pilgrim story was romanticized in poetry and paintings. The purpose of such portrayals was glorification, not historical accuracy. After the fourth Thursday of every November was designated by President Lincoln as Thanksgiving Day, the Pilgrim image became ubiquitous in American popular culture. Those simple, hardworking settlers of one of America's first towns began to assume mythic proportions. This study of how the Pilgrims have been represented in American cultural life mainly focuses on the development of the performances in the Living Museum of Seventeenth Century Plymouth at Plimoth Plantation. After World War II a plan was devised to replicated the "First Street" of Plymouth. By the late 1950s Pilgrim houses were reconstructed, and mannequins depicted scenes of Pilgrim life. Docents, dressed in somewhat inauthentic period garb, described the historical significance of the tableaux. The cultural revolution of the 1960s brought also a revolution in the style of representing the Pilgrims. In an attempt to define the real Pilgrims, the idea of "sainted ancestors" was eradicated. James Deetz, an anthropologist from Harvard, established a new approach to ethnohistorical research. In portraying the Pilgrims in this era, reenactors made no attempt to glorify but instead to give earnest assessment of all ethnographic data available and to re-create an authentic Pilgrim. Deetz and his colleagues established a "living museum" in which history was no longer described and discussed, but, rather, reenacted. This book documents and analyzes the momentous shift in the style of representing the history at Plimoth Plantation. It closely examines the emergence of the first-person, role-playing re-creation that is based upon performing ethnography. An important work in the field of performance studies, it explores postmodern cultural forces at work in the late twentieth century. Stephen Snow, Ph.D., RDT-BCT, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Creative Arts Therapies at Concordia University in Montreal. Most recently, he completed a three-year project (2005-2008) in Performance Ethnography with adults with developmental disabilities at Concordia's Centre for the Arts in Human Development, of which he is a Co-Founder.

When is an artistic work finished? When the copyeditor makes the final correction to a manuscript, when the composer writes the last note of a symphony, or when the painter puts the last brushstroke on the canvas? Perhaps it's even later, when someone reads the work, when an ensemble performs, or when the painting is hung on a gallery wall for viewing?
"Art from Start to Finish "gathers a unique group of contributors from the worlds of sociology, musicology, literature, and communications--many of them practicing artists in their own right--to discuss how artists from jazz musicians to painters work: how they coordinate their efforts, how they think, how they start, and, of course, how they finish their productions.
Specialists in the arts have much to say about the works themselves, which are often neglected by scholars in other fields. "Art from Start to Finish" takes a different tack by exploring the creative process itself and its social component. Any reader who makes art or has an interest in it will value this book.