Friday 8 March 4pm, Rangimarie Rooms 1 and 2, Te Papa

Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews completes the memorial complex. At the monument we honor those who died by remembering how they died. At the museum we honor them by remembering how they lived. This lecture explores the creation of the POLIN Museum and its multimedia narrative exhibition, a journey of a thousand years, and their potential to be an agent of transformation that can move an entire society forward.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); and They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt). She received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for Jewish museums in Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow.

This is a Te Papa free public lecture followed by refreshments