The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814350453 ISBN 13: 9780814350454

Publisher: Wayne State University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Exploring the people and contexts that imbue Jewish material culture with its meaning.

About this title

About the Author

Gabrielle Anna Berlinger is associate professor of American studies and folklore and the Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Scholar in Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a folklorist and ethnologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Israel and who previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the "Cultures of Conservation" initiative at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Ruth von Bernuth is a professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies from 2013 to 2022. Her research interests include German and Yiddish literature and culture. From 2012 to 2013, she held the Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the Rothschild Foundation in Israel and a Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

From the Back Cover

In museums, synagogues, antique stores, and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied, and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as "Jewish," and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? Drawing from material culture studies, folklore studies, and curatorial perspectives, this collection aims to answer these questions and reveal the life histories of Jewish things. Essays consider assemblages ranging from Holocaust ephemera to religious relics and pieces of art. Each time these materials cross geographic, cultural, or social borders, their Jewishness is redefined through new dialogues about maker and user, buyer and seller, insider and outsider. Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814350453
• ISBN 13: 9780814350454
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 334
• Editor: Berlinger Gabrielle Anna, Bernuth Ruth Von