The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture

Panel Discussion Admission: Free Registration is required. Register

The Jewish inn was a center of economic and social life in Polish lands before the World War II. While its primary role was to provide hospitality, it also functioned as a multifaceted hub for business, leisure, and religious festivities, reflecting its vital role in the community. In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm, editors Halina Goldberg and Bożena Shallcross present 11 articles that delve into the inn's significance as a symbolic incubator of Jewish cultural possibilities. From exploring the intricate connections between music, dance, and other arts within the inn, to highlighting the increasing prominence of women in the inn's family dynamics, this collection offers an interdisciplinary look at this central pillar of Jewish Polish culture.

Join YIVO for a panel discussion with Goldberg and contributors Glenn Dynner, Beth Holmgren, and Eliza Rose about this book.

Buy the book.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Halina Goldberg is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is Director of the digital project, “Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź,” and the author of Music in Chopin's Warsaw.

Glenn Dynner holds the Jay Berkowitz Chair in Jewish History at the University of Virginia. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006); Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014); and The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2024). He is also Editor of the journal Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

Beth Holmgren, Professor Emerita of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University, has published widely on Polish literature, theater, popular culture, and film—scholarship ranging from the award-winning books Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland to Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America. Over the last decade, she produced a series of articles exploring the Polish Jewish foundations of sophisticated popular culture in the interwar period and the wartime and postwar diaspora. Holmgren is currently completing the final, separately published American chapter of the biography, Warsaw is My Country: The Story of Krystyna Bierzyńska, 1928-1945 (2018). After Krystyna Bierzyńska lost most of her Jewish family to Nazi round-ups, killing centers, and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, she served as a 16-year-old orderly in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and emigrated to the United States in 1951 as co-combatant in the Allied forces.  

Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Columbia University in 2020. Her articles on visual cultures of state socialism have been published in journals such as Slavic Review and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. Her current research investigates an ambitious campaign in late-socialist Poland to integrate industry and the visual arts. Her translations of Polish scholarly and art writing have been published widely.