FestivALT 2023

Event program

FestivALT – a 10-day festival of Jewish art, activism and education, is another event carried out as part of the MultiMemo project. The program included 24 events: performances, discussions, urban walks, workshops, exhibitions, created by authors and artists from Central and Eastern Europe, America and Canada.

The festival was themed around the notion of intersectional memory with a particular focus on “doykait” – a Yiddish word that can be understood as “Hereness” or the “here and now”. It was an idea popularized during the interwar periods by the Bund (Jewish Socialist Party) and it was most commonly connected to the struggle for Jewish rights and cultural autonomy wherever Jews were living. For the Bund, this meant advocating for the strengthening of Central and Eastern European Jewry and firmly claiming their homeland in the Diaspora, rather than being separated out and relegated to Israel. For FestivALT we used the notion of “Doykait” as advocative lens for the contemporary intersectional Polish Jewish Identity.