“Music in Polish-Jewish Communities and the Holocaust”
Professional Background
Ms. Julia Riegel is a PhD candidate in history at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her MA in history from Indiana University, and BA from Gonzaga University. A native English speaker, Ms. Riegel possesses language skills in French, German, Yiddish, and Polish. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Riegel will work on her project, “Music in Polish-Jewish Communities and the Holocaust.”
Ms. Riegel has presented her research at a number of conferences, including: “‘Jewish Composers are the Crowning Achievements of Foreign Nations:’ Jewish Identity and Yiddish Nationalism in the Writings of Menachem Kipnis,” presented at The Musical Worlds of Polish Jews, 1920-1960: Identity, Politics, and Culture conference at Arizona State University on November 17-18, 2013; “Collected Memory: Songbooks and the Preservation of Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust,” presented at the Indiana University Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association Conference on February 20-21, 2014; and “‘The Man Will Awake:’ Partisans and the Reinterpretation of Jewish Masculinity during the Holocaust” at the Indiana University Paul Lucas Conference on March 22-24, 2013. She is also the prestigious winner of a Fulbright Institute for International Education Grant for dissertation research in Poland, the Alice Ginott Cohn, PhD. and Theodore Cohn grant-in-aid for research and language study, the Hill Fellowship for pre-dissertation research, a U.S. Department of State Title VIII Grant for the study of Polish, and the Stolnitz Yiddish Prize.
Fellowship Research
For her Sosland Fellowship at the Mandel Center, Ms. Riegel will examine music’s plural roles in Polish-Jewish communities from the end of the First World War to the establishment of the state of Israel, and will seek to contextualize music temporally in the Holocaust era. Rather than treating the Holocaust as a historical rupture, Ms. Riegel will demonstrate the ways in which Jewish composers and singers borrowed and adapted older forms of musical expression to new circumstances, giving Holocaust victims the ability to express and find refuge from suffering.
Ms. Julia Riegel was in residence at the Mandel Center until November 30, 2016.