in Poland then.”

After Weinberg died of a stroke, in January 2000, it fell to his deputy Jerzy Halbersztadt to keep the project going. Halbersztadt, a historian by training, had worked as a liaison in Poland for the Holocaust museum in Washington. But, like Pawlak and Turski, he lacked the international museum connections and cosmopolitan experience Weinberg brought to the project. In 2006, he offered Kirshenblatt-Gimblett the job of overseeing the development of the core exhibition. “There was a wave of criticism from all sides, from Polish historians, from Jewish academics here in Poland, from Israelis, from some in America as well,” Halbersztadt told me. “They asked, ‘How is it possible an American Jewish professor will be head of such a team?’ ” But Halbersztadt was determined. “Barbara, withher brilliant mind and her competence in evaluating various museums in Israel and America, was the right one,” Halbersztadt said.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett grew up in a heavily Jewish Toronto neighborhood alive with Yiddish and fond memories of the old country. Her father, the painter Mayer Kirshenblatt, left prewar Poland as a child for Canada, and he gifted his oldest daughter with a deep sense of the importance of material culture. She met her husband, the New Zealand-born painter Max Gimblett, at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, where she was representing the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, when she was 19, just after she returned from spending a year on ulpan in Israel. “She had a hobby of copper enameling, and I was a potter,” Gimblett, a bluff extrovert who is an