Sunday, May 3, 2026 @ 2 p.m. ET

The earliest Jewish museums focused exclusively on religious objects and works of art. Then came museums of Jewish history and the Holocaust. Only recently has Yiddish begun to feature more prominently in museum exhibitions—at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, and the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. Now the Yiddish Book Center’s permanent exhibition has created the world’s first museum of Yiddish culture. In this lecture, renowned scholar and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore what it means to put Yiddish on display. How do such exhibitions change our understanding of Jewish history and shape the way we understand Yiddish as a language and a culture?