Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland, with Sheila Jelen
Sun, Aug 02
|Northbrook Public Library
A lecture on Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942), a Jewish East European ethnomusicologist, folklorist, and photographer, whose stories and photos portray record a world destroyed in the Holocaust.
Time & Location
Aug 02, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Northbrook Public Library, 1201 Cedar Ln, Northbrook, IL 60062, USA
About the Event
Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.
Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to…