Taking S. An-sky's expeditions to the Pale of Jewish Settlement as its point of departure, the volume explores the dynamic and many-sided nature of ethnographic knowledge and the long and complex history of the production and consumption of Jewish folk traditions. These essays by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and folklorists showcase some of the finest research in the field. They reveal how the collection, analysis, and preservation of ethnography intersect with questions about the construction and delineation of community, the preservation of Jewishness, the meaning of belief, the significance of retrieving cultural heritage, the politics of accessing and memorializing "lost" cultures, and the problem of narration, among other topics.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction Jeffrey VeidlingerPart I. History of the Ethnographic Impulse1. Thrice Born, or Between Two Worlds: Reflexivity and Performance in An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and Beyond Nathaniel Deutsch2. Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Siècle Russian Empire Marina Mogilner3. To Study Our Past, Make Sense of Our Present and Develop Our National Consciousness:" Lev Shternberg's Comprehensive Program for Jewish Ethnography in the USSR Sergei Kan4. "What Should We Collect?": Ethnography, Local Studies, and the Formation of a Belorussian Jewish Identity Elissa Bemporad5. Yiddish Folklore and Soviet Ideology during the 1930s Mikhail Krutikov6. After An-sky: I.M. Pul'ner and the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad Deborah Yalen7. "Holy Sacred Collection Work": The Relationship between YIVO and its Zamlers Sarah Ellen Zarrow8. The Last "Zamlers": Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski in Vilna, 1944-1945 David E. FishmanPart II. Findings from the Field9. Ethnography and Folklore among Polish Jews in Israel-Immigration and Integration Haya Bar-Itzhak10. The Use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the Rituals of Contemporary Jewry of Bukovina and Bessarabia Alexandra Polyan11. Food and Faith in the Soviet Shtetl Jeffrey Veidlinger12. Undzer Rebenyu: Religion, Memory, and Identity in Postwar Moldova Sebastian Z. SchulmanPart III. Reflections on the Ethnographic Impulse13. Ex-Soviet Jews: Collective Autoethnography Larisa Fialkova and Maria Yelenevskaya14. Family Pictures at an Exhibition: History, Autobiography, and the Museum Exhibit on Jewish Lódz "In Mrs. Goldberg's Kitchen" Halina Goldberg15. Seamed Stockings and Ponytails: Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Contemporary Hasidic Community Asya Vaisman SchulmanPart IV. By Way of Conclusion16. From Function to Frame: The Evolving Conceptualization of Jewish Folklore Studies Simon J. BronnerList of ContributorsIndex