Review of Jeffrey Shandler’s Homes of the Past: A Lost Jewish Museum

Jeffrey Shandler’s Homes of the Past explores the intersections of memory, loss, and the subtle politics of cultural preservation through the lens of YIVO’s interesting failed attempt to establish a museum dedicated to the Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The book examines the story of this project, conceived by Jewish American scholars in 1943 and abandoned soon after the end of the war, as a parable from which to draw consequences about the rapidly changing notions of homelessness, roots, and identity in the face of unprecedented catastrophe of cultural and material dimensions. The main reason for the abandonment of the project, Shandler seems to suggest, was not so much that of the mismatch between the capacity of YIVO as a research institute and its modest funding on the one hand, and the ambitious financial requirements that such a project entailed on the other. Rather, it was the change brought about by the Holocaust in the identities and sentiments of the museum’s target audiences as well as in those of the visionaries who conceived it. At the core of this change stood a transition from a diasporic nationalist identity to that of the typical civic-nation ethnic identity, and the implications of this transition to one’s attitude towards one’s lost roots and how to commemorate them. The Holocaust thus marks not only an unavoidably pivotal moment in the context of Jewish history, but also in that of the Jewish attitude to that history, in the writing of Jewish history, at the moment when needs and hopes of documentation become the needs and hopes of memorialization. Through a detailed narration of the conceiving and abandonment of the project, Shandler explores America’s Jewish intelligentsia’s retelling of its own myth of origin, by its negotiation with the symbolic power of material objects. Ultimately, Shandler uses the story of this neglected endeavor as a means of studying broader questions about society’s tools for upholding a sense of continuity in the face of unprecedented ruptures.

The monograph builds on the author’s long-standing interest in the intersections of Jewish culture and media of memory. His While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York/Oxford, 1999) analyzed the impact of media on the shaping of the image of the Holocaust, showcasing his commitment to understanding how cultural narratives are constructed and preserved. In his canonic Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley, 2006), the author explored the (post-vernacular) role of typical Yiddish idioms in contemporary Jewish life, and how Jewish communities engage with their Yiddish heritage in modern contexts. In Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (New Jersey, 2014) he interrogated the evolving meanings of the notion of shtetl in Jewish and non-Jewish imagination, tracing its transformation from a lived space to a powerful cultural symbol. Homes of the Past, therefore, marks an interesting methodological shift by the author who now centers on a very brief episode in Jewish American history, and uses it as a springboard to reflect upon the changing aspirations that shaped YIVO’s mission, as an elitist institution dedicated to the study of a vanishing culture.

The broader context of Shandler’s study, then, is the history of Jewish memorialization practices. It should be read alongside Richard I. Cohen’s Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley, 1998), which studies the ways in which European Jewish art expressed the struggles of Jews to find their place in hegemonic European culture. In contrast to Cohen’s work, Shandler’s “Homes of the Past” focuses on a decisive brief moment in American Jewry, as it transitioned from a typical society of immigrants grappling with its notions of “di alte heym” (the old home) and its place in their identity, to a community whose “old home” has been wiped out. Hence, they now have to grapple with the altogether different and more burning task of deciding what should not be forgotten and what must be remembered. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley, 1998) is likewise relevant here, as it provides a crucial theoretical framework for understanding how exhibitions function as acts of cultural production rather than mere representations of the past. Unlike Shandler, who examines an unrealized museum project, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett focuses on how heritage is staged and performed, analyzing the ways in which museums, tourism, and cultural displays transform absence into presence. Another interesting work to be mentioned in this group is Barbara Mann’s The Object of Jewish Literature: A Material History (New Haven, 2022), which examines how modern Jewish cultural history is reflected in the material aspects of isolated (well-chosen) literary objects. All of these studies use the interesting method of meditating upon material objects in search of the greater context that imbued their cultural significance.

The objects that feature in Shandler’s narrative are the artifacts of Eastern European Jewry. These constitute a long line of relics from the pre-modern era to the time of the Holocaust: the contents of synagogues and of Jewish study halls, documents and manuscripts from civic organizations, and so forth. Together, they narrate the disintegration of traditional Jewish society and the emergence of a new, modern Jewish culture. The Eastern European Haskalah of the late nineteenth century was already interested in studying these relics, as well as preserving them and making use of them as cultural media of self-determination. Alongside ethnographers and folklorists emerged Judaica dealers and collectors. They sought to exhibit their collections, sometimes in dedicated display spaces—galleries and museums—as a means of increasing their value, and as part and parcel of their search for a root-based identity.

The rationale for these exhibitions was (or at least purported to be) both educational and ideological. They hoped to present the cultural treasures of Judaism to the dominant society and, at the same time, to teach Jews about their uniqueness. All this in the service of the general Enlightenment self-conception of Jews as citizens with equal rights in the emerging civic nation-states. The exhibited objects were not merely Judaica artifacts with nostalgic value, but also included the products of the new Jewish culture—printed materials, illustrations, textiles works, plays, musical sheets, education accessories, fine art objects, photographs, and more. The transition from the pre-modern community to modern society carried with it new hopes of integration into the dominant national culture through participation in a shared cultural sphere. The history of Jewish museology thus reflects the history of European Jews’ longing to feel “at home” in the new civic societies of Europe. Alongside this yearning there was a discernible desire for legitimacy to their newly evolving identities—especially those that abandoned religion as the central marker of Jewish identity in favor of a more secular set of identity markers. In particular, Yiddish as a language and as a culture became the primary axis of their new sense of distinctiveness. For these modern Jews the museum was not only a space for learning about the place they once came from, but also a space for negotiating and imagining the place they aspired to go, the people they wanted to be. It was to be a space that not only displayed the origins of Jewish culture and formulated its myth of origins, but also one in which new products of modern Yiddish culture beyond Eastern Europe are being displayed.

All this changed dramatically between the two world wars. At that time, up until the Nazi occupation, national museums and galleries in Eastern Europe usually refused to display Jewish exhibitions. The hopes of Jews for the recognition of their new cultural identity by the dominant civic culture were disappointed. Jewish educational, cultural, and research institutions that had been established in Eastern Europe to assert new identities—those based on language and culture, such as The Jewish Museum in St. Petersburg and its Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society—gradually disbanded. The cultural assets they had collected were transferred (or sold) to other institutions, both Jewish and non-Jewish, which once again regarded them as historical artifacts representing a past that no longer existed. Alongside these developments, one must also acknowledge the systematic plunder of cultural treasures carried out by the Nazis across Europe. Curators, archivists, librarians, writers, artists, educators, and intellectuals were turned into forced laborers in the Nazi project of reducing Jewish cultural capital to mere economic wealth.

It is within this context that the remarkable initiative of YIVO scholars—their aspiration to establish in New York a museum dedicated to the “Homes of the Past”—must be understood. Early on the creators and visioners of this project sought collaboration with landsmanshaftn (hometown associations) as well as other Jewish cultural organizations in the city. They aimed to unify and oversee an umbrella organization for these associations, particularly by consolidating the archival materials that had been gathered separately by each association. Their goal was to create a large-scale exhibition space organized according to the various Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Each community was to have its own display, composed of materials collected from members of the hometown association: photographs, personal and communal correspondence, documents, songs, proverbs, idioms and expressions, jokes, folktales and legends, descriptions of prominent figures from the community, various household objects, clothing, etc.

Had such a museum been realized, it could not only have exhibited the cultural history of Eastern European Jewry, telling its story, but also set it within the context of the greater mosaic of the New York experience. It would have allowed both Jews and non-Jews—first-generation immigrants as well as their second- and third-generation descendants—to meet face to face with the past of Eastern European Jews and their culture, thereby affirming and shaping the ideological vision of Jewish culture as a secular, national-diasporic heritage.

The landsmanshaftn were thus the most natural strategic partners in establishing the museum. They were much more than mere desired partners: they were essential—without them, the project had no hope. Shandler notes that the landsmanshaftn responded weakly and without enthusiasm to join the common cause. He documents this response as part of his fine description of the project’s fate. I would like to complement his description with what I regard to be the primary reason for the landsmanshaftn reluctance to cooperate. In the very same year that the idea of the museum was conceived (1943), the first Holocaust Yizker book was published—The Lodzher Yizker Bukh. Work on it had begun in 1940, as a response to the establishment of the ghetto, driven by the desire of the Lodz landsmanshaft in New York to raise funds in an attempt to assist members of their community who had been imprisoned there. ^{1 1} On the Lodzher Yizkerbukh, see: Drucker Bar-Am, G. (2023). ‘“Record and Lament:” Yizker Bikher as history and literature conflated.’ Yad Vashem Studies, 51(2), 101–128. As it was written, however, it transformed into a harrowing documentation of the community’s destruction. Within months of its publication, the hometown associations realized that Yizker books were the most effective means of connecting members of the community through a fusion of a story of origins and a morning medium. They therefore devoted their energy to these projects, which quickly turned in effect to a competing endeavor to the YIVO project.

Due to their activities in supporting the first generation of immigrants, the funds of many landsmanshaftn were steadily depleting. Recruiting new members through preservation and memorial projects, therefore, became a vital act. Some organizations even planned and erected new buildings. They did so mainly in the United States, in Argentina, and in Israel (and in some cases, a landsmanshaft building in each and every one of those immigration hubs). Yizker books, and smaller exhibition spaces, then, became a competing documentary project to the grand unifying museum, and the financial needs of the hometown associations conflicted with the notion of supporting an umbrella organization that sought to centralize their cultural assets. Individuals and families were reluctant to part with the archival materials in their possession—items that had become increasingly rare following the destruction of Eastern Europe. Of course, there were those who remained committed to YIVO’s Enlightenment-inspired ideals, as Shandler notes, but they were a minority compared to those who preferred the more communal and intimate mourning projects of their hometown associations. It was only in 1979 that YIVO acquired the archives of the remaining landsmanshaftn, after they had passed into the hands of their heirs. By that time, the second and third generations of immigrants had grown, their needs had changed, and most educational and cultural institutions based on hometown origins had either closed or had come to rely on Israel and its institutions as part of the broader effort to “connect with Jews in the diaspora.”

The story of the abandoning of YIVO’s Homes of the Past is, then, the story of the power dynamics between the different institutions that sought to commemorate Jewish life in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. Before the war, such Jewish institutions sought to celebrate their success story and so faced an entirely different challenge. After the war, these aims radically changed and with them the challenges that they entailed. It is interesting, in this context, to note the observation of historian Deborah Yalen that the establishment of Jewish museums in Eastern Europe today is typically made possible through the collaboration of Lubavitcher Hasidim and the Russian-Jewish oligarchs (cited by Shandler, 140). In the search for the capital needed to build and maintain these memorial institutions, the humanist and liberal Enlightenment values that underpinned YIVO’s original vision are abandoned, then, and they are replaced instead by more traditional, and even regressive, partnerships between religion and wealth. The story of the conceptualization and eventual abandonment of YIVO’s museum is fascinating precisely because it encapsulates the collapse of humanist, liberal Jewish Enlightenment culture.

Through Homes of the Past, Shandler not only revisits a neglected episode in Jewish history but also offers a profound meditation on the ways societies preserve, construct, and reinvent their pasts. His work will contribute to future discussions on Jewish museology, historical memory, and the evolving identities of Yiddish-speaking American Jewry.