Yiddish Culture and Interwar Paris: The 1937 World's Fair & The Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Arts, Music, and Theatre at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free

Interwar Paris was an exciting, yet widely under-examined hub of immigrant Yiddish culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, approximately 150,000 immigrant Jews from eastern and central Europe came to Paris, transforming themselves from a disparate group of immigrants unsure of their place in France to a community connected and coalesced around a new, transnational Western European, Yiddish diaspora nationalism. Based on what is the first cultural history of the immigrant Jewish community in Paris, this talk will discuss the Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair - a virtually unknown exhibition of global Yiddish culture. Constructed specifically for World's Fair, the Modern Jewish Culture Pavilion put Yiddish Paris on the world stage, and highlighted the communal power that culture could have for immigrant Jews in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

About the Speaker

Nick Underwood is a PhD Candidate in modern European history and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His dissertation is titled "Staging a New Community: Immigrant Yiddish Culture and Diaspora Nationalism in Interwar Paris, 1919-1940.” This year, he is the Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow in East European Jewish Arts, Music, and Theatre at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and James R., Ann R. and R. Jane Emerson Dissertation Fellow at the University of Colorado. He has three forthcoming articles in 2016, which will be published in French Politics, Culture & Society, Urban History, and East European Jewish Affairs.