"The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture"

In museums, synagogues, antique stores, and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied, and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as "Jewish," and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? Join us as we welcome Gabrielle Anna Berlinger and Ruth von Bernuth to learn about their new edited collection, which traces the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture. 

Gabrielle Anna Berlinger, Ph.D. is associate professor of American studies and folklore and the Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Scholar in Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a folklorist and ethnologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Israel and who previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the "Cultures of Conservation" initiative at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.  

Ruth von Bernuth PhD. is a professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies from 2013 to 2022. Her research interests include German and Yiddish literature and culture. From 2012 to 2013, she held the Yad Hanadiv Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies at the Rothschild Foundation in Israel and a Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

REGISTER HERE