The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture

Exploring the people and contexts that imbue Jewish material culture with its meaning.

In museums, synagogues, antique stores, and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied, and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as ＂Jewish,＂ and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? Drawing from material culture studies, folklore studies, and curatorial perspectives, this collection aims to answer these questions and reveal the life histories of Jewish things. Essays consider assemblages ranging from Holocaust ephemera to religious relics and pieces of art. Each time these materials cross geographic, cultural, or social borders, their Jewishness is redefined through new dialogues about maker and user, buyer and seller, insider and outsider. Each contributor’s insight builds bridges between curators, private collectors, scholars, and archivists whose diverse perspectives inform a growing conversation in folklore, religion, and Jewish studies that places material culture at the heart of Jewish cultural and historical narratives. Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.

Gabrielle Anna Berlinger is associate professor of American studies and folklore and the Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Scholar in Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a folklorist and ethnologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Israel and who previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the ＂Cultures of Conservation＂ initiative at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Ruth von Bernuth is a professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies from 2013 to 2022. Her research interests include German and Yiddish literature and culture. From 2012 to 2013, she held the Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the Rothschild Foundation in Israel and a Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.