Sarah Ellen Zarrow, "Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941" (Cornell UP, 2025.)

August 14, 2026

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Displays of Belonging: How Polish Jews Used Museums to Argue for Their Place in a Nation That Didn't Yet Exist

When historian Sarah Zarrow began digging into the archives of a Jewish museum in Lviv, she found documents that were already under threat—not from time or neglect, but from Russian rocket attacks. The fragility of these sources mirrors the fragility of the world they describe: a vibrant, complex Polish Jewish culture that was building institutions to prove its belonging, even as the ground shifted beneath it.

Zarrow's Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025) follows a cohort of Jewish ethnographers, collectors, and museum founders who tried to answer a question that haunted Polish Jewish life: Do Jews belong to Poland, and if so, how?

The Poland That Didn't Exist Yet

The book opens in the 1890s, when there was no Polish state. Poland had been partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria since the late 18th century. The Jews Zarrow studies lived primarily in two of these partitions: the Tsarist Russian partition and the Habsburg-controlled region called Galicia. Jewish life in both was extraordinarily diverse—religiously, politically, and socially.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:35) **Introduction and Guest Background** - Host Paul Lerner welcomes Sarah Ellen Zarrow and introduces her book on Polish Jewish collecting and museums.
2 (06:14) **Historical Context: Poland and Jewish Life (Late 19th Century)** - Zarrow explains the political landscape of partitioned Poland and the diversity of Jewish society.
3 (10:04) **The Shift to the Second Polish Republic** - Zarrow discusses how the rebirth of Poland after WWI created both opportunities and fears for Jews.
4 (14:09) **The Collectors: Who They Were and What They Collected** - Zarrow profiles the eccentric, obsessive collectors who drove the museum movement.
5 (19:54) **The Ethnographic Impulse: Studying Jews in the Countryside** - Zarrow explains how Jewish ethnographers surveyed rural populations and their relationship to museum creation.
6 (25:53) **The Colonial Comparison and Its Tensions** - Zarrow explores how the colonial gaze and the idea of "civilizing" rural Jews shaped the collectors' and ethnographers' perspectives.
7 (30:02) **The Role of Science** - Zarrow explains how scientific methods justified both Jewish modernity and Polish independence.

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Show Notes

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermediaries between less-integrated Jews and the Polish cultural elite.

At the turn of the century, Jewish ethnographers and museum creators staked their claim to belonging to the civic nation though the display of Jewish folk art, fine art, and Judaica. After the First World War, the nearly three million Jews in the Second Polish Republic were suddenly challenged with finding a place for themselves in a state that increasingly defined itself as a creation of the ethnic Polish nation, to which Jews, by many accounts, did not belong.

By tracing emergent documentation and display practices in partitioned Poland and in the interwar Second Polish Republic, Sarah Ellen Zarrow offers a better understanding of how integrated Jews identified with Polish culture and history and with non-Jewish Poles, and how they conceived of, negotiated, and argued their collective place within Poland. This is not a case of assimilation, nor of acculturation, but rather of displaying a parallel culture that was at once similar and yet distinctive.

Displays of Belonging offers a nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which Jews in Poland saw their present and dreamed of their future. It places Jewish ethnographic practice and art collection within a Polish context, and sheds light on ways in which ideas about belonging and national identity were negotiated in the space of museums.

Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Book here Faculty page here Email & Social Media: [email protected] @plerner.bsky.social

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