ordained Buddhist monk, told me when we met in New York. “I took her to a bar and she gave me a treatise on how she was never going to get married. A year later, we were married.” After Kirshenblatt-Gimblett finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, the pair went to San Francisco, where Kirshenblatt-Gimblett earned her Master’s degree at Berkeley, and then to the University of Indiana at Bloomington, where she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on traditional Jewish storytelling in the Toronto community where she grew up. She was in the first generation of scholars, primarily women, to explore folk arts and crafts as an academic subject. “Men in Jewish professional life were not used to looking at Jewish life as resource material, and Jewishart and art history was an unexplored subject,” said Nancy Berman, the former director of the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, who met Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in 1975 when she was recommended as a consultant for the Skirball’s textile collection. “Her subject was ethnography and folklore, and she was a star in that world.”

In 1972, they moved to New York, where Kirshenblatt-Gimblett went to work at YIVO, the Yiddish research institute. She cultivated a bohemian existence on the Bowery with Gimblett, whose painting studio dominates their loft, but professionally she plugged into a thriving Jewish cultural scene. At YIVO, her colleagues knew her by her Yiddish name, Brayndl. (Today, most of her New York colleagues refer to her by her initials, BKG, while her Polish colleagues call her Barbara, with