MiSifrei: What a Bookplate Can Tell Us About Binghamton's Jewish Life in the 1900s

Author: Esther Klein

Field of Study: Arts and Humanities

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Bridget Whearty, Jeremy Dibbell

Easel: 45

Timeslot: Midday

Abstract: Pasted unevenly within the endpapers of God’s Man, one of America’s first precursors to the graphic novel, is an intricate bookplate of Jewish scholar bent over in study. In large font is featured the name James B. Gitlitz; in miniscule is M. Villency. As two Jews that lived in Binghamton — the former a first generation American that stayed in Binghamton his entire life, the latter an immigrant that left to begin a furniture company successful to this day — their radically different lives, as presented through memoirs, obituaries, and artistic legacy, reveal the evolution of Jewish life and tradition in the 20th century, from assimilation to the longer term implications of the Holocaust. Despite their lives’ bifurcation, Villency and Gitlitz maintained a lifelong familial connection that begs the question of whether Judaism as an instituion was a source of weakness and isolation as gentiles wanted Jews to believe.