Ghettoes and Quarters: European Jewish Life under the Regimes of Tourism and Memory

The legacy of the Jewish ghetto in Venice is deep in time and vast in reach. The richness of this unique space of Jewish memory is enhanced by the peculiar nature of Venice itself. As the Jewish ghetto and its small community of practicing Jews struggle between the impulse to foster dynamic Jewish life and the desire to memorialize and preserve a precious space, the city of Venice itself is standing on a precarious foundation and constantly undermined or reimagined by tourism, preservation, commodification, and of course the slow sinking that adds intensity to the other three processes. This project uses these Venetian slippages between continuation and preservation, as well as commodification and musealisation, to analyze the process and politics of development and tourism in cities that contain a history of Jewish ghettos and spaces that have come to represent Jewish life (Jewish quarters). Using this approach I will examine Krakow (the Schindler factory and the process of gentrification in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz), Warsaw (the contrast between the memorialization of the Warsaw ghetto and projects like the POLIN museum that attempt to reinvigorate a sense of Jewish culture), and Prague (where the site of the former Jewish ghetto, torn down for reasons of sanitation, is now the wealthiest quarter of the city and capitalizes on its few remaining Jewish relics).