Salvage Poetics: The Photographs That Helped Us Reconstruct a Lost World

The Old World in Image and Imagination. How do American Jews “know what they think they know” about pre-Holocaust European Jewish life? Chicago YIVO Society hosts this free zoom event by Dr. Sheila Jelen as she examines the role that images by photographers such as Roman Vishniac played in shaping the post-Holocaust reconstruction of that world among American Jews. What rhetorical and visual strategies were used to build bridges between different kinds of Jews in different historical moments?

Sheila E. Jelen 

Sheila Jelen is the Zantker Professor of Jewish Literature, Culture and History at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: American-Jewish Post Holocaust Folk Ethnographies (2020) and Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (2007). She has edited numerous volumes, including Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (2017), Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (2011), and Hebrew, Gender and Modernity (2007). Her work has appeared in such jo