Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Collecting the Pieces of Exile: A Critical View of Folklore Research in Israel in the 1940s-1950s
Folk-culture is typically associated with continuity; how can one engage folk-culture in situations of destruction and extermination - the reality Zionist folklorists confronted facing the Shoah? With the first bits of information regarding the destruction in Europe, many of them assembled in Tel Aviv to form the Yeda Am folklore society; in tandem, the Institute for Jewish Folklore was formed in Jerusalem. The two competing organizations dealt with fragmentary lives in the Diaspora in different ways, in their quest to find new meanings from them. This dissertation examines Zionist folkloristics at this dire hour from a perspective that views fractured reality as a fundamental principle in studying cultures in general, by combining approaches from folklore studies and science and technology studies. The dissertation undermines the distinction between individualist scholarly knowledge and collective folklore by examining everyday scholarly habits: Archival practices, the use of letterheads, jubilee celebrations of scholars as well as practices of editing and laying out scholarly publications. The tension between national culture and ethnic cultures is revealed in new ways, as is the relationship between avant-garde and folklore studies.
Dani Schrire was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology at Georg August University Göttingen (Minerva) and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Lady Davis fellow (2011-2012), as a Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (2013) and a Warburg fellow at the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies and at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania).
In 2015 he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University where he is currently a senior lecturer affiliated to the Programme in Folklore and Folk-Culture Studies (Head) and the Programme in Cultural Studies. He is also a member of the IRTG Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond, conducted in cooperation with Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute.
His dissertation appeared in print at Magnes Hebrew University Press in 2018: Collecting the Pieces of the Jewish Diaspora: Zionist Folkloristics in Face of the Shoah.
Other Publications (selection):
1. 2016. “Ballads of Strangers: Constructing ‘Ethnographic Moments’ in Jewish Folklore,” in Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, eds. Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press): 322-346.
2. 2017. “Max Grunwald and the Formation of Jewish Folkloristics: Another Perspective on Race in German-Speaking Volkskunde,” in Ideas of Race in the History of the Humanities, eds. Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan): 113-138.
3. 2021. “Becoming a Version: The Case of Walter Anderson’s Studies of Yiddish Folk-Narratives,” Narrative Culture 8: 129-154.
4. 2022. “Hinter der Faust: Jüdische und deutsche Volkskunde vor Detmold 1969.” In Detmold, September 1969: Abschied vom Kanon. Ein internationaler Rückblick auf die Deutsche Volkskunde in der Diskussion, eds. Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Christiane Cantauw, Jan Carstensen, Friedemann Schmoll and Elisabeth Timm (Münster: Waxmann).
5. 2023. “Poetic Emancipation: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Study of Folk-Narratives,” Fabula 64, 213-242.
6. 2023. “Postcards of the Holy Land: Kaleidoscopic Heritage offered by a Modern Global Object,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 29 (5), 441-466.
7. 2025. “Traveling on a Dogsled to the Jordan Valley: Fieldwork in the Study of Folklore of Jews,” Journal of Folklore Research 62 (1-2), 113-135.