Looking beyond Poland's internationally lauded new Jewish museums, this article asks how Jews are represented in longer-standing folk and ethnographic museums whose mandates have been to represent the historical culture of the Polish nation. How have such museums navigated growing internal pressures to incorporate Jews and reconsider the boundaries of “Polishness” alongside external pressures to rethink the function and approach of ethnographic museology? Based on three museums that have taken three different approaches to Jewishness—what we call cabinet of Jewish curiosities, two solitudes, and ambivalent externalization—we assess the roles played by inherited discourses and structures as well as human agents within and beyond the museum. We illuminate how social debate about the character of the nation (and Jews’ place in it) plays out in museums at a moment in their transition from nineteenth- to twenty-first-century paradigms and how a distinctively Polish path toward a “new museology” is emerging in conversation with and resistance to its Western counterparts.
ERICA LEHRER is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is Professor in the Departments of History and Sociology-Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. She is author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (2013) and coeditor of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (2016), Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015) and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011). She has also written numerous articles. She curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy (2013) and co-curated Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2018–2019), both at The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. Email: erica.lehrer@concordia.ca
MONIKA MURZYN-KUPISZ holds a PhD from the Kraków University of Economics and an MA in European Leisure Studies, which is a joint diploma of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Tilburg University, Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao and Loughborough University. She is a professor at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She specializes in multidisciplinary research within the broad fields of urban studies and heritage studies with a special focus on heritage, museums, cultural and creative activities, artists, and urban regeneration processes, in particular their analysis in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. Email: monika.murzyn-kupisz@uj.edu.pl; ORCID: