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He will also present “Building the Warsaw Museum of the History of Polish Jews”
Michael Steinlauf, Associate Professor of History at Gratz College in Philadelphia, will make two presentations April 1 on Jewish history and theater.
At noon in the Gendebien Room of Skillman Library, he will give a brown bag lunch presentation called “The Dybbuk in the Twentieth Century,” focusing on the reception of the classic Yiddish play The Dybbuk. The 1937 film version of the play will be screened at 7 p.m. March 25 in Limburg Auditorium, Farinon Center.
He will also present a slide lecture entitled “Building the Warsaw Museum of the History of Polish Jews” at 7:30 p.m. in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104. Steinlauf serves as senior historical consultant for the museum, which is scheduled to open in several years.
Steinlauf’s visit is sponsored by the department of religious studies, the Jewish Studies program, the Russian and East European Studies program and the Friends of Skillman Library.
Steinlauf teaches Jewish history and culture at Gratz College. Fluent in Yiddish and Polish, he has been to Poland as a Fulbright Fellow and as project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has also been senior research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He is a contributing editor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008) and editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, v. 16 (2003), the first collection of studies focusing on Jewish popular culture in Poland and its contemporary afterlife.
He is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), which examines how the experience of witnessing the Holocaust shaped Polish history and consciousness in the half century after the war. His work on Jewish theater and press in Eastern Europe and Polish-Jewish relations has been translated into Hebrew, Polish, German and Italian.