New Genre Art Interventions and the Polish-Jewish Past

In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations

Re-curating Testimony: Pedagogy for “Self-Aware” Witnessing

This paper will present the pedagogical approaches and initial outcomes from our experimental seminar at Concordia University titled “Curating Difficult Knowledge: Engaging with the aftermath of violence through public displays, memorials, and sites of conscience.” In this seminar, we sought to engage students in both critical examination and creative production around the question of what it means to “learn from the past” as global violence continues, based on a series of assignments designed to (1) bring them into deep engagement with survivor testimony while highlighting the numerous factors mediating this encounter; and (2) produce public displays based on this testimony that highlight these factors. The goal was for students to both learn about and apply their knowledge by actually attempting the hard work of representation at a critical historical juncture first hand. The emergent pedagogical insights will explore the many ways that ever-larger circles of people, removed in terms of community, generation, experience, are being asked to relate to Holocaust testimonies existing apart from their tellers. We will draw from our experience in critical museology, working with survivor testimony, and our respective attempts to develop new methodologies, pedagogy, and theory for confronting these difficult dilemmas. Stories of suffering are generally approached in the public realm with the sense that they are difficult because they contain subject matter that is painful, tragic, or gruesome. Less public attention is typically paid to the problems inherent in their transmission: that they are inevitably mediated, perspectival, and often contested. Our analysis of the process and final products produced in this course highlight the social lives of testimony and the broader work of memory in ethnographic terms, as it is concretely deployed in sites of embodied social practice. We continually remind students about social and cultural difference, power and perspective, and that in a global age, one cannot presumed a unitary “public” who will predictably consider, sympathize, or identify with Holocaust-related materials

Portrait of a people: the Jewish Heritage Collection dedicated to Mark and Dave Harris

The Jewish Heritage Collection was a gift made jointly to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the University Library, which aptly reflects the comprehensive and unique nature of this collection. This collection combines materials traditionally found in libraries (e.g., books, pamphlets, printed ephemera, and manuscripts) with objects of museum quality (artwork and historical artifacts) and an assortment of items of humbler nature used in everyday life. The curators have chosen several themes around which to organize the display, in order to demonstrate both interesting items from the collection and topics for study it can easily support. The full Portrait of a People Online Exhibit follows a brief biography of Constance Harris and an excerpt from her book, The Way Jews Lived. as well as essays on how the collection was assembled and how it will be used written by the Elliot Gertel and Erica Lehrer.Special Collections Libraryhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108167/1/Portrait-of-a-people.pd

Lacunarity, lexicography and beyond: integration of the introduction of a linguo-cultural concept and the development of L2 learners’ dictionary skills

The paper discusses the integration of presenting theoretical linguocultural knowledge and developing dictionary skills in advanced students of a foreign language. The proposed approach allows showing students the interdisciplinary character of various issues, one of which is cross-linguistic lacunarity. It is given as an example of a phenomenon, whose introduction can be combined with the development of students’ dictionary use abilities. Lacunarity consists in the lack of some source language elements in the target language. Two main kinds of lacunae are distinguished: linguistic and referential ones. The focal issue of the paper is how the information on the lacunary character of words can be presented to advanced students of English as a foreign language, in this paper Polish learners, so that they could consider the phenomenon in terms of bilingual lexicography: first, becoming aware of the specifics of their description; second, practising their dictionary skills by analysing entries for selected lacunary lexical and phraseological units; third, combining the information and skills in doing creative tasks, related to lacunarity and its bilingual lexicographic descriptions. Furthermore, additional activities are proposed for revising the acquired knowledge on lacunarity and advancing dictionary use. Offering students tasks, which require them to adopt a different perspective, aims to increase their involvement in the learning process and to foster their autonomy as learners. Encouraging learners to reflect on lacunae and their lexicographic description is expected to familiarize them with the phenomenon and simultaneously to develop their dictionary skills by doing especially designed [email protected] University of Bialystok101-11

Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges