Lucky Jews? Contested Objects in Poland's Heritage Industries

Lecture Joint presentation by YIVO and Fordham University Admission: Free

Anthropologist Erica Lehrer (Concordia University) will discuss Polish-made figurines depicting Jews, a controversial phenomenon with diverse historical precedents and a new popularity today. These uncanny objects touch on questions about the role of material culture in negotiating traumatic memory, identity and difference, global heritage economies, the politics of culture, interethnic relations, and sympathetic magic. Lehrer will discuss them in the context of two curatorial projects: the exhibition Souvenir, Talisman, Toy (2013), which resulted in the book Lucky Jews (2014), and the project-in-progress Awkward Objects of Genocide. She views Poland's Jewish figurines as intersectional objects that both bind and divide communities, as well as complex objects of witness that congeal multiple vectors of memory. In dialogue with debates about "bystander" perspectives in Holocaust memory studies, "difficult heritage," and the productive possibilities for curating "difficult knowledge," Lehrer works to leverage these objects as catalysts for critical memory work that transcends the terms of today's defensive public debate about Poland's Jewish past.

Location: Fordham School of Law | Rm. 4-09 | Lincoln Center Campus, 150 West 62nd Street | New York City

For more information, contact Magda Teter, the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University: (347) 364-3472 or jewishstudies@fordham.edu.

For additional information, please visit fordham.edu/JewishStudies.