Polonsky – författare

This volume highlights new research on Jewish spiritual and religious life in Poland before modern political ideas began to transform the Jewish world. It covers a range of topics. Three articles deal with rabbinic scholarship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a fourth presents accounts of Purim festivities at that time. The eighteenth-century studies focus on Jewish spirituality. Four articles deal with the Frankist movement, the main topics being Frankist propaganda; non-Christian Frankists; Jonathan Eibeschuetz and the Frankists; and the influence of Frankism on Polish culture. There are four articles on hasidism-on the tsadik and the ba'al shem; the childhood of tsadikim in hasidic legends; the fall of the Seer of Lublin; and the hasidism of Gur-and one about Nahman Krochmal. Of the contributors to the core section on Jewish spiritual and religious life, four are Polish. Three contributors are working in Germany, where Jewish studies is likewise re-establishing itself. Other contributors are scholars from Canada, Israel, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some are themselves religious, others are secular; taken together, their contributions further the study of Jewish religious traditions in Poland, a topic central to an understanding of Jewish society and history in Poland but one which has long been considered marginal by the academic world. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given to new research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies. There is an extensive survey of the papal Holocaust papers, as well as contributions relating to education for girls, to Auschwitz as a site of memories, and to aspects of Jewish literature, politics, society, and economics. A young Polish scholar from Jedwabne has contributed a moving article on local reactions to news of the massacre of the Jews of that town. The review section include two separate essays with contrasting opinions on Yaffa Eliach's monumental study of Eishyshok.

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The volume is edited by Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women's history in the United States, and by ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their Introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender. As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in 'New Views', to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies, and there is a book review section.

This volume is devoted to the part Jews played in the history of Lódz between 1820 and 1939. Specifically, it focuses on the place of the Jews in the industrial elite of this multi-ethnic textile town, and on its role as a centre of the modern movement and of Jewish artistic and literary creativity. It is the result of a collaborative venture with the Historical Institute of the University of Lódz.CONTRIBUTORS Kazimierz Badziak, Natan Gross, Julian K. Janczak, Maria Kaminska, Tamara Karren, Stanislaw Liszewski, Jerzy Malinowski, Leszek Olejnik, Wieslaw Pus, Stefan Pytlas, Yosef Salmon, Pawel Samus, Robert Moses Shapiro, Chone Shmeruk, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, Barbara Wachowksa, Jacek Walicki, Janusz Wrobel