02:00pm - 04:00pm  What You Can Learn From Bubbe’s Photos; Or, Jewish Clothing as Cultural History

  Speaker: Eric Silverman What could be more mundane that clothing? Yet old Jewish garments can illustrate the complex social worlds in which Jews have always lived. For most of Jewish history, clothing represented a tension between dressing Jewish and dressing like everybody else. Clothing, that is, communicated messages about the different ways one could be Jewish in particular eras. This was especially true in the late-19th and early 20th-centuries, precisely the era in which the ancestors of most American Jews migrated to the United States. This talk, lavishly illustrated with images, show how we can ‘read’ the clothing in old Jewish ...