HOMES OF THE PAST: A LOST JEWISH MUSEUM. By JeffreyShandler. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2024. p. 154. Hardback, $75; paper, $32.

In this engaging monograph, Jeffrey Shandler excavates the little-known history of a failed World War II-era museum project conceived by researchers at the New York branch of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. This museum, referred to in English as the “Museum of the Homes of the Past” and in Yiddish as the “muzey fun di alte heymen,” was an attempt to bridge the gap between first- and second-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants—the former, who had been shaped by the vibrant Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, and the latter, who having been raised in the United States, were detached from the thriving Jewish culture of their ancestral homelands. Conceptualized in the early 1940's, the museum was almost dead upon arrival. The trauma of the Holocaust and the concomitant memory projects engendered by the near decimation of European Jewry far exceeded the intended ethnographic scope of this museum, which implicitly relied upon the continued thriving of Eastern European Jewish homelands for its intended diasporic audience. By the 1950's, the once grand plans for a brick-and-mortar museum had disappeared, leaving in its absence a more limited archival photograph collection known as the “Museums of the Old Homes: photographs of traditional life in the towns of the Old Homes in Eastern Europe” and a publication with the Yiddish daily newspaper, Forward, titled “Die farshvundene velt/The Vanishing World.” Shandler mines the archival materials available in YIVO's internal records and publications from the 1940s and 1950s to tell the poignant story of this ambitious but unrealized museum of Eastern European Jewry in New York. With chapters on the history of Jewish museums, the foundation of the YIVO Institute in Vilna, Lithuania, and its outpost in New York, the development of the Museum of the Homes of the Past, its dénouement in the postwar period, and later museums with similar missions in North America, Europe, and Israel, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of Jewish and diasporic museum studies, Eastern European Jewish ethnography, and postwar Jewish memory projects.