On Thursday, October 19, the Institute hosted a virtual lecture with our Plessner New Perspectives in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies Award recipient, Jules Riegel—a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University—titled “The Voices of the Starving: Beggars’ Music in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
The Warsaw Ghetto—the largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe—imprisoned roughly 460,000 Jews at its peak. Its society was marked by severe overcrowding and inequality, and many turned to begging to survive, drawing attention to their plight using songs, cries, shouts, and other sounds. Though beggars’ desperation was clear to all ghetto residents, non-beggars’ reactions to their songs and other sounds were often uncomfortable and even hostile. Close readings of diaries, reports, and song texts from the ghetto, alongside memoir and testimonies, reveal that these reactions stemmed from longstanding anxieties about the Jewish community’s status as civilized and European. Examining how non-beggars—especially educated people and members of the prewar intelligentsia—wrote about beggars’ music in the ghetto also indicates the continuing relevance of polemics against shund (artistic “trash”) in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe. Even so, some beggars’ songs gained widespread popularity by directly confronting inequality and ghetto authorities’ abuses of power. Beggars were an intrinsic part of ghetto society, and the debates their music engendered reveal how Polish Jews imagined their community’s future, even at the moment of its destruction.
Dr. Riegel’s lecture about the musical culture of the Warsaw Ghetto is available to view in full below.
Jules Riegel (they/them) received their Ph.D. in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. They are currently a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. Their scholarship has been supported by a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies; a Fulbright Institute of International Education Grant to Warsaw, Poland; and a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Sosland Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.
Riegel’s book project, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust, and are planning future research on transgender history in Eastern Europe. Their publications include a forthcoming article in Jewish Social Studies on beggars’ music in the Warsaw Ghetto and an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.
This event was made possible by the generosity of Rene Plessner and the Kaye family.
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