The Media Line Book Talk: Yechiel Weizman, 'Unsettled Heritage'

Join us on Zoom for a virtual book talk with Dr. Yechiel Weizman of Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

In his new book, Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022), Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust. He asks how postwar Polish society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources and anthropological field work, the book uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of Poland’s material Jewish remnants and shows how their presence became the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation. In so doing, the book offers a methodological channel to analyze how postwar societies approach their own material remnants of populations past, especially those whose presence alludes to enduring animosities and conflicts unresolved.

Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He studied history, philosophy and cultural studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and completed his PhD (2018) at the University of Haifa. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow and at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research interests focus on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, post-WWII Jewish Material Culture and property restitution, Polish-Jewish relations in the 20th and 21st centuries, and Holocaust photography.

NEXT FROM

Truth and understanding

They all said they cover it.

We see it.