The curator of the Polish Jewish museum wins $500k award – here’s her story
The entrance of POLIN, the Museum of the History of Jewish People on Warsaw, Poland Image by Getty/Chuck Fishman /Contributor
By PJ Grisar February 20, 2020
In late January, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett received a call from an unfamiliar Israeli number. It was the president of Tel Aviv University, informing her she had received an award of half a million dollars.
“It’s like a TV show when they call you completely out of the blue,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the core exhibition at POLIN, Poland’s Jewish museum in Warsaw. “It was a thunderbolt. It was, as they say, min hashamayim.”
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Image by Photo by Marta Kusmier
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Lonnie Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, share the $1 million 2020 Dan David Prize for Cultural Preservation and Revival. The prize foundation, based at Tel Aviv University, awards three $1 million prizes in three categories. This year, there are two laureates sharing each award. Bunch and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will split the money and each will give 10% to scholarships for doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships in their field (she knows exactly where to put the money, but won’t say quite yet).
Awards are nothing new for Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, an accomplished Jewish studies scholar, Yiddishist and prolific author, but this recognition — a lifetime achievement award — was different. For one thing: The date of the ceremony was a problem.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said of the news. “May 17 is my late sister’s birthday, and May 17 is the day that her youngest son is getting married.”
She got the blessing of the groom, and plans to be in Tel Aviv for the awards, which have occurred annually since 2001.
It’s fitting that a family matter came up.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s roots loom large in her work. She collaborated with her late father, Mayer, for over 40 years, interviewing him for what became the book “They Called Me Mayer July,” which featured his paintings and text from their conversations about his childhood in pre-World War II Opatów, Poland. Her work with POLIN was a homecoming of sorts.
“There’s a very deep personal connection, no question,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. “My parents were born and raised in Poland. I basically moved there; I lived there full time for almost 10 years. I still have an apartment there.”
Kirshenblatt-Gimnlett became a Polish citizen while working at POLIN. During the first years the museum was operational, the politics in Poland changed, with the right-wing populist Law and Justice party leading the government and often coming into conflict with more liberal cultural leaders.
But Kirshenblatt-Gimblett acknowledged a continued level of support from all the mayors of Warsaw and every Polish president since the museum’s inception. For her, the museum is a model of relative institutional independence in a country where many cultural institutions are overseen solely by the Ministry of Culture. POLIN is governed by a public-private partnership between three co-founders, the Ministry of Culture, the city of Warsaw and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, a private NGO.
This independence was recently threatened by a year-long stalemate, as Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński refused to reappoint POLIN’s well-regarded director, Dariusz Stola, who stepped aside in February to make room for a successor.
“I think that he held out to the very end and understood that it would be in the best interest of the museum at this point to withdraw his candidacy, which of course was a very sad day for us,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said of Stola. “I think he will continue to be very important for us, even without being the director.”
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said that POLIN strives to be “authoritative without being authoritarian,” a mission that the Dan David Prize appears to recognize.
“I would say that at this particular moment, this prize means the world, because it’s a real affirmation of international appreciation — appreciation from Israel — for the value and the importance and the achievement of this museum,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is continuing her hard work for the museum, a project that she emphasized was a group effort. She and her team are currently expanding the core exhibition with a section on Polish Jewish populations that resettled and brought their culture with them and another section called “Legacy,” about Polish Jews who distinguished themselves in the field of art, industry and academics.
One could say that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett belongs among those accomplished Polish Jews — in which field, who’s to say — but she is more humble.
“I’ve always said ‘Yes, I was asked to lead the development of the core exhibition,’ which I would say is absolutely the heart and soul of the museum,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “But I saw my goal really as a midwife, as an orchestra conductor, as someone whose task it was to bring out the very best of all the talented people that I worked with. That was my job, and I believe that that is the secret to the success of this museum.”
Correction February 21, 2020, 6:53 am: An earlier version of this article stated that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett won an award worth $1 million. She will receive $500,000, splitting the $1 million total prize money with her co-recipient and giving 10% to fellowship scholarships. We regret the error.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].
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