distinguished New York University academic who chaired the department of performance studies at Tisch School of Arts and holds an appointment in the university’s department of Hebrew and Judaic studies—the museum is also an effort to re-animate a vanished Jewish world she has spent a lifetime exploring. At the time she was chosen to head the museum’s exhibition team, in 2006, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was finishing an illustrated memoir of her father’s prewar Jewish life in the Polish town of Apt, which is located halfway between Warsaw and Krakow. The book, They Called Me Mayer July, was, in many ways, a bookend to Image Before My Eyes, the groundbreaking photographic history she co-authored with the Łódź ghetto survivor Lucjan Dobroszycki in 1977. “I’m an outsider to Poland, but I’m anvery easy for this project to become more and more Polish,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, whose formal role will end once the exhibit is completed. “It will become a Polish state institution.”

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Less than a century ago—just barely within living memory—Poland was still home to more Jews than the United States. The trend lines were moving clearly in America’s favor, even before the shadow of Nazism fell across Europe, but Poland remained the crucible of modern Jewish culture, with artists and performers and scholars traveling back and forth between Bialystok and New York. The depressed rural shtetl life conjured by the photographer Roman Vishniac and the folk tales of Y.L. Peretz and other Yiddish writers existed alongside the tremendous wealth and cosmopolitanism of the urban bourgeoisie—people who wouldn’t recognize themselves in