PAST: CULTURAL PRESERVATION AND REVIVAL

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett currently serves as the Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

As the child of Polish Jews who immigrated to Canada, Prof. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett always felt deeply connected to the history of this vibrant community and the civilization they created. She made it her mission to recover the memory of a lost world and transmit the legacy of that world to future generations.

A prolific writer, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), winner of two book awards, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler), among others.

She was honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received the Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University, and the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. She was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She serves on Advisory Boards for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Albania, Israel, and the United States.

She considers herself “fortunate to have been able to bridge the academy and the world, to carry out research and share it beyond my students and colleagues, and, through my work, to both honor the legacy of Polish Jews and foster dialogue in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect.”