Lecture 1: Masterplan: Theatre of History

Lecture 2: Materializing the Past

Lecture 3: The Post-Jewish Object 

Materializing History: The Making of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition was a part of a lecture series on Jewish Material Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at NYU, as well as the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. This now available online lecture series explores how the POLIN Museum’s exhibitions use space, architecture, and material objects to tell the thousand-year history of Polish Jews—from the Masterplan and the reconstruction of the Gwoździec synagogue to the concept of “post-Jewish” property shaped by Holocaust-era dispossession. Through recreated artifacts and memory paintings, the lectures reveal how material practices generate new historical knowledge and reflect the transformation of Jewish spaces over time. Learn more…