Topic:

Behold the Vanished World: Visions of Prewar East European Jewish Life After the Holocaust

Among the wide-ranging efforts undertaken in the early aftermath of the Holocaust to memorialize Polish Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and recall their prewar way of life, visual works reflect a challenge of particular urgency and poignancy, as much of prewar Jewry’s visual culture had been destroyed or rendered inaccessible by the war.  Postwar visual engagements with prewar Polish Jewish life therefore grapple not only with the loss of people and their culture but also with the disruption of visual mediation—and, moreover, of the visible.  The postwar trope of characterizing prewar Polish Jewry as a “vanished world” implies the loss of any visible traces of the past.  A key strategy among the earliest efforts to address this loss in visual terms is the repurposing of available prewar visual materials, especially photography, in works of remembrance, ranging from published photo albums to avant-garde artworks.  These efforts are complemented by works of memory art by Holocaust survivors and other former residents of prewar Polish Jewish communities and by photography projects that document the absence of Jews and their culture in the postwar East European landscape.  In all these undertakings, visualizing is juxtaposed, if sometimes implicitly, with the unseeable, forging a powerful trope of remembrance in which the desire to behold the past is construed, if implicitly, as being inherently problematic.

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.  He received a PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University.  Shandler has also been a visiting scholar at the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Center, Tel Aviv University; the Center for Religion and Media, New York University; the Jewish Studies Program, University of California Berkeley; the Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California; and the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University. 

Shandler’s books include While America Watches:  Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999); Adventures in Yiddishland:  Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture; Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), which analyzes the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on American Jews’ religious life, from early recordings of cantorial music to hasidic outreach on the Internet; and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), an examination of how Jewish life in East European provincial towns has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship, from the early modern era to the present. Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives:  Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Entertaining America:  Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012). His work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Polish. 

Shandler’s translations of Yiddish literature include Mani-Leyb’s children’s classic Yingl Tsingl Khvat (Moyer Bell, 1986) and Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (Roaring Brook, 2006).  He has curated exhibitions for The Jewish Museum of New York, the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.  Shandler has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.