About
The book Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery was inspired by an international conference, “Centering the Periphery: Polish Jewish Cultural Production beyond the Capital,” which included a concert, “Soundscapes of Modernity: Jews and Music in Polish Cities.”
Both events were part of the Fifth Annual Polish Jewish Studies Workshop held at Rutgers University in March 2018, organized by Natalia Aleksiun, Halina Goldberg, and Nancy Sinkoff.
A highlight of the workshop was the exhilarating concert “Soundscapes of Modernity: Jews and Music in Polish Cities,” held at the Kirkpatrick Chapel at Rutgers, presenting orchestral, choral, and chamber music, written and produced by Jews in both secular and religious contexts, most of which was little known to those in attendence and some of which has never been performed in the United States. The musicians’ exquisite artistry would have made any performance memorable, but “Soundscapes” had an added poignancy. Many of these works remain unknown to us because the artists themselves were murdered during World War II and the postwar Jewish community in Poland had more pressing issues than reviving the music of their modernist forebears. As one audience member commented, “We know what we lost in the ‘old country,’ but we are always hoping against hope to find any trace of the magnificent culture that existed among the Jews of Poland. You gave us a powerful and rich portrait of the differing styles that were popular during the interwar period.”
The concert was performed by professional musicians and students at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University: Paul Conrad, Jordan Enzinger, Yenhsuan Lee, Erin Schwab, Jihyang Seo, and Enriqueta Somarriba. The choir was prepared and conducted by Patrick Gardner, distinguished professor of music and director of choral activities at the Mason Gross School of the Arts (now emeritus), whose talents are legion and who was deeply committed to presenting his students with the highest professional artistic experiences while modeling diversity, civics, and humanism.
Organizational support for the workshop and the concert was provided by Susanna Treesh, then administrative director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers, and Rebecca Cypess made the concert possible by connecting us to the talented musicians of the Mason Gross School of the Arts. This website is co-sponsored by the The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University.
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Authors’ Bios:
Halina Goldberg is a professor of musicology and director of Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, editor of a special issue of the Musical Quarterly devoted to Jewish culture and music, and director of the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź.
Nancy Sinkoff is a professor of Jewish studies and history and academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the author of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History and Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands.