Section Menu

[Re]Thinking Jewish Heritage: Opportunities and Limits Amidst Openings and Closings

Daniel Walkowitz

Kristallnacht Memorial Lecture 2019

Holocaust narratives dominate contemporary Jewish heritage tourism, but an exciting New Jewish History offers a new paradigm in which the Jewish Street, and notably the Bund, is at the center of the making of Modern Jewish identity. Illustrated with slides, the lecture illustrates the possibilities, challenges, disappointments and surprises that frame the robust and changing terrain of Jewish Heritage today in cities such as Kiev, Krakow, Berlin, Warsaw, Lviv, Lodz, Bucharest and Belgrade to London and New York and two shtetlekh in eight countries.

Daniel Walkowitz, Emeritus Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and Emeritus Professor of History at New York University, is a social and cultural historian who in nearly a dozen books, two dozen articles and four films for public television pioneered efforts to bring America's past to broad general audiences in books, film and video. He brings together his interest in history and memory in his most recent book, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States (Rutgers, 2018).