This talk presents the book Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery, coedited by Halina Goldberg and Nancy Sinkoff, focusing on its historiographic framework. Polish Jewry has been often conceptualized through studies of the metropole, Warsaw, and its assimilating circles, its Jewish press, Jewish politics, and more. Likewise, the history of Jews in Poland in the modern period has also frequently been framed solely as a political narrative. Goldberg and Sinkoff’s approach emphasizes the capaciousness of the concept of Polish lands to accommodate the rootedness of Jews in Polish soil—and its link to the notion of doikayt (Yid. lit. hereness or at-homeness)—while at the same time underscoring their regional diversity. It highlights the vitality of Polish Jewish urban culture beyond Warsaw by addressing the production and consumption of culture—including literature, film, cabaret, theater, architecture, the fine arts, and music. It is Polish Jews’ engagement with music, in particular, that serves as a central narrative thread in this presentation.

Halina Goldberg is a professor of musicology and director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, editor of a special issue of the Musical Quarterly titled Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives, and director of the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu.

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