The Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Bring Forward the Sources: Approach to Language(s) at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, director of the Core Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, explains how different languages relevant to the history of the Jews in Poland were curated within the Museum's Core Exhibition.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

This excerpt is in English.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1942.

This interview is part of the Yiddish in the Academy: scholars, language instructors, and students series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

"I Realized Everything I Needed Was There": Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on Beginning Jewish Folklore In Her Family

"I Can't Tell You How Many Apartments in the Bronx I Visited": Collecting a Yiddish Library

"That Family Was a Dynasty": Meeting the Weinreichs

"It Was the Genius of a People": Eastern European Jewish Folklore and the YIVO

“The Most Frightening Thing”: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet on Giving YIVO Keynote in Yiddish

"The Holocaust Is Not the Inevitable Outcome of the History of the Polish Jews"

"I Think To Myself, Where Are the Jews?": The Representation of Jews in Polish History

"That Was Sort of An Amazing Experience": Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett On Getting Polish Citizenship

Orange Organza, Blue Organza: Celebrating an Exhibition of Jewishness in Opatów, Poland

"Nous parlons Français, mir redn yidish": Five Languages of Business in My Father's Toronto Store

"It was black market money, it was no food in the stores-": First Impressions of Poland under Martial Law

More information about this oral history excerpt

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