Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry – serie

Few features have shaped east European Jewish history as much as the extent and continuity of Jewish self-rule. Offering a broad perspective, this volume explores the traditions, scope, limitations, and evolution of Jewish self-government in the Polish lands and beyond. Extensive autonomy and complex structures of civil and religious leadership were central features of the Jewish experience in this region, and this volume probes the emergence of such structures from the late medieval period onwards, looking at the legal position of the individual community and its role as a political actor. Chapters discuss the implementation of Jewish law and the role of the regional and national Jewish councils which were a remarkable feature of supra-communal representation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.The volume reflects on the interaction between Jewish legal traditions and state policies, and offers an in-depth analysis of the transformation of Jewish self-government under the impact of the partitions of Poland–Lithuania and the administrative principles of the Enlightenment. Co-operation between representatives of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities at the local level is discussed down to the interwar years, when Jewish self-government was considered both a cherished legacy of pre-partition autonomy and a threat to the modern nation state.

Few features have shaped east European Jewish history as much as the extent and continuity of Jewish self-rule. Offering a broad perspective, this volume explores the traditions, scope, limitations, and evolution of Jewish self-government in the Polish lands and beyond. Extensive autonomy and complex structures of civil and religious leadership were central features of the Jewish experience in this region, and this volume probes the emergence of such structures from the late medieval period onwards, looking at the legal position of the individual community and its role as a political actor. Chapters discuss the implementation of Jewish law and the role of the regional and national Jewish councils which were a remarkable feature of supra-communal representation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.The volume reflects on the interaction between Jewish legal traditions and state policies, and offers an in-depth analysis of the transformation of Jewish self-government under the impact of the partitions of Poland–Lithuania and the administrative principles of the Enlightenment. Co-operation between representatives of the Jewish and non-Jewish communities at the local level is discussed down to the interwar years, when Jewish self-government was considered both a cherished legacy of pre-partition autonomy and a threat to the modern nation state.

An in-depth and multifaceted investigation of how Polish Jews, Polish Zionism, and Polish culture influenced Israel’s cultural and political development, as well as of how the Zionist project influenced Jewish life in Poland. From its inception as a political movement, Zionism had as its main goal the creation of a ‘New Jew’ who could contribute to building a Jewish state, preferably in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, where Jews would free themselves from the negative characteristics which, in the view of the ideologues of Zionism, had developed in the diaspora. Yet, inevitably, those who settled in Palestine brought with them considerable cultural baggage. A substantial proportion of them came from the Polish lands, and their presence significantly affected the political and cultural life of the Yishuv, and later the State of Israel. In this volume, scholars from Israel, Poland and elsewhere in Europe, and North America explore different aspects of this influence, as well as the continuing relationship between Israel and Poland, up to the present day.

Changes in childhood and children’s roles in society, and in how children participate in determining their own lives, have long been of interest to historians. Recent years have seen the emergence of new perspectives on the study of childhood, both in historical scholarship and in literary and cultural studies. Children’s experiences are now scrutinized not only as a means of examining the lives and self-representation of young individuals and their families, but also to investigate how the early experiences of individuals can shed light on larger historical questions. This volume applies both approaches in the context of Jewish eastern Europe. Historian Gershon Hundert has argued that studying the experience of children and attitudes towards coming of age offers an important corrective to the way we think of the Jewish past. This volume proves the potential of this approach in exploring many areas of historical interest. Among the topics investigated here are changes in perceptions of childhood and family, progress in the medical treatment of children, and developments in education. The work of charitable institutions is also considered, along with studies of emotion, gender history, and Polish–Jewish relations. From the First World War until after the Holocaust and the Second World War, countless children experienced traumatizing events. A special section is dedicated to their fate.

Changes in childhood and children’s roles in society, and in how children participate in determining their own lives, have long been of interest to historians. Recent years have seen the emergence of new perspectives on the study of childhood, both in historical scholarship and in literary and cultural studies. Children’s experiences are now scrutinized not only as a means of examining the lives and self-representation of young individuals and their families, but also to investigate how the early experiences of individuals can shed light on larger historical questions. This volume applies both approaches in the context of Jewish eastern Europe. Historian Gershon Hundert has argued that studying the experience of children and attitudes towards coming of age offers an important corrective to the way we think of the Jewish past. This volume proves the potential of this approach in exploring many areas of historical interest. Among the topics investigated here are changes in perceptions of childhood and family, progress in the medical treatment of children, and developments in education. The work of charitable institutions is also considered, along with studies of emotion, gender history, and Polish–Jewish relations. From the First World War until after the Holocaust and the Second World War, countless children experienced traumatizing events. A special section is dedicated to their fate.

Historians have largely tended to regard Polish Jewish history and German Jewish history, from the Middle Ages to the present, as playing out solely within national boundaries, thereby ignoring the interactions that have in practice shaped Jewish cultural life. Geographical proximity has meant that Jews from both countries have been linked through kinship ties as well as shared economic, cultural, and linguistic realities. The complexity of this relationship and its consequences have been only partially reflected in scholarship. This volume takes a different approach, shifting the focus away from the nationally distinct to investigate instead mutual influences and interactions. Moving beyond the traditional paradigms that characterize Polish Jewry as ‘authentic’ and German Jewry as ‘modernizing’, it challenges the sharp historiographic division between these two communities and opens up a nuanced understanding of modern European Jewish history.Interested in subscribing to Polin? Institutional subscriptions are now available via LUP's Journals department. To find out more or to recommend Polin to your institutional librarian, please visit: https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/polin

Jewish attitudes to the body, gender, and sexuality are traditionally influenced by religious considerations. Explorations in this volume extend to how communal and state-related concerns have intersected with the personal—in care for the elderly, birth control, white slavery, and burial, as well as in the recent entanglement of antisemitism and misogyny. Holocaust-related topics include gender-dependent perceptions of warfare; gender and pogrom violence; how impersonating diverse identities became a matter of survival; how the plunder of Jewish clothes engaged the bodies of both victims and bystanders; and how mass graves perpetuated a Jewish presence after the genocide. Other studies include how the Jewish body has been construed in fiction, ego-documents, and (queer) poetry, and how Jewish youth thought about sport. The volume concludes with four reflections on the embodied self.

Until 1939 Poland was the heartland of European Jewry, and the Polish Jewish community was still one of the largest and most important in the world. For nine centuries it was one of the central forces in the shaping of Jewish culture and its impact on the shaping of modern Jewry-religious and secular-was profound. An understanding of the history of the Jews of Poland is thus essential to a proper understanding of Jewish history. This book, comprising a selection of studies drawn from the first seven volumes of Polin, provides that understanding. Written by scholars from Europe (including Poland itself), Israel, and North America, it illuminates the most critical aspects of the history of the Jews in Poland and illustrates how these issues are being treated by the leading and most innovative scholars in the field. A broad spectrum of subjects is discussed, covering the origins and development of the community and the many crises it experienced from the earliest date of Jewish settlement in Poland to the establishment of Communist rule in postwar Poland. Maps and a chronology of Polish Jewish history are also provided, and the book is prefaced by an extensive introduction by Antony Polonsky, general editor of Polin. CONTRIBUTORS: Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Israel Bartal, David Biale, Eugene C. Black, Jan Blonski, Norman Davies, David Engel, Jacob Goldberg, Gershon David Hundert, Krystyna Kersten, Stefan Kieniewicz, Pawel Korzec, Ewa Kurek-Lesik, Magdalena Opalski, Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, Eugenia Prokopowna, Laura Quercioli-Mincer, M. J. Rosman, Szymon Rudnicki, Pawel Samus, Robert Moses Shapiro, Chone Shmeruk, Shaul Stampfer, Michael C. Steinlauf, Pawel Szapiro, Jean-Charles Szurek, Janusz Tazbir, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Paul Wexler, Anna Zuk

Jewish society in Poland-Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century was by no means insular: Jews numbered about 750,000, and comprised about half the urban population of the country. The contact between Jews and the wider Polish society found expression in the languages Jews knew, in their marriage patterns, even in their synagogue architecture and decoration, but also in Polish accusations of Jewish ritual murder. All these aspects are here systematically reviewed. Internal factors influencing developments within Jewish society are discussed: treatments of the medieval rabbinic ban on polygamy, as well as various influences of the growing interest in kabbalah-its impact on synagogue structure, on prayer, and on the spiritual world of women. The growth of hasidism is considered through critical analysis of the legends about its founder, Israel Ba'al Shem Tov. This wealth of topics helps to fill the gaps in our understanding of Jewish life in this important period. The New Views section of the volume incorporates valuable studies on other topics.Articles include a revisionist view of the beginnings of Polish Jewry, based on analysis of medieval manuscripts; a thought-provoking review of the depiction of Polish-Jewish relations in recent Polish cinema; a study of the NKVD's treatment of Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter; and an erudite study of mayufes as a window on Polish-Jewish relations. The Book Reviews section includes a debate between Tomasz Gasowski and Artur Eisenbach on the latter's book on Jewish emancipation in Poland; review essays of books on Auschwitz and on I. B. Singer; and twenty-seven individual book reviews, followed by a bibliography of Polish-Jewish studies for 1994. The contemporary state of Polish-Jewish relations is covered, along with additional aspects of Jewish life in today's Poland, in an article by Poland's Ambassador to the Jewish Diaspora, Krzysztof Sliwinski. CONTRIBUTORS: Paul Coates, Artur Eisenbach, Tomasz Gasowski, Jacob Goldberg, Zenon Guldon, Thomas C. Hubka, Gertrud Pickhan, Elchanan Reiner, Moshe Rosman, Chone Shmeruk, Krzysztof Sliwinski, Daniel Stone, Israel M. Ta-Shma, Nechama Tec, Chava Weissler, Elimelech Westreich, Jacek Wijacka.

Addressing various aspects of Jewish life and religion, particularly in the last two centuries, this book examines different aspects of the Hasidic tradition; present-day contacts between Bobower Hasidism in New York and Bobowa in Poland; and how a rabbi trained in the Lithuanian tradition adapted to the very different conditions of the United States. The modifications of Jewish religious tradition practiced in the modern pre-war synagogues in Warsaw, L dz, and Lw w are considered, as is the attempt by Hillel Zeitlyn to re-interpret Jewish tradition in the interwar years.

From 1772-1918 Jews were concentrated more densely in Galicia than in any other area in Europe. Bartal (modern Jewish history, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Polonsky (Judaic and social studies, Brandeis University) are joined by a number of other scholars of Judaism to explore the Jewish community in Galicia and its relationship with the Poles, Ukranians, and other ethnic groups. Essays include discuss of the consequences of Galician autonomy; Galician Jewish migration to Vienna; the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the 18th century, the assimilation of the Jewish elite; and levels of literacy among Poles and Jews.

The assessment of the Nazi genocide in Poland, an issue which has deeply divided Poles and Jews, lies at the core of this volume. Also included are discussions of Polish attitudes to the nearly 300,000 Jews who tried to resettle in post-war Poland; the little-known testimony of Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder; a discussion of Holocaust victims as martyrs; and a presentation of how the Auschwitz Museum sees its future.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created in 1569, covered a wide spectrum of faiths and languages. The nobility, who were the main focus of Polishness, were predominantly Catholic, particularly from the later seventeenth century; the peasantry included Catholics, Protestants, and members of the Orthodox faith, while nearly half the urban population, and some 10 per cent of the total population, was Jewish. The partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and the subsequent struggle to regain Polish independence raised the question of what the boundaries of a future state should be, and who qualified as a Pole. The partitioning powers, for their part, were determined to hold on to the areas they had annexed: Prussia tried to strengthen the German element in Poland; the Habsburgs encouraged the development of a Ukrainian consciousness in Austrian Galicia to act as a counterweight to the dominant Polish nobility; and Russia, while allowing the Kingdom of Poland to enjoy substantial autonomy, treated the remaining areas it had annexed as part of the tsarist monarchy. When Poland became independent after the First World War more than a third of its population were thus Ukrainians, Belarusians, Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians, many of whom had been influenced by nationalist movements. The core articles in the volume focus especially on the triangular relationship between Poles, Jews, and Germans in western Poland, and between the different national groups in what are today Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. In addition, the New Views section investigates aspects of Jewish life in pre-partition Poland and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are also the regular Review Essay and Book Review sections.

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.

Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus on elite culture and canonical literature; even modern Yiddish culture has generally been approached from the perspective of ‘great works’. This volume of Polin focuses on the less explored but historically vital theme of Jewish popular culture and shows how, confronted by the challenges and opportunities of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it blossomed into a complex expression of Jewish life. In addition to a range of articles on the period before the Second World War there are studies of the traces of this culture in the contemporary world. The volume as a whole aims to develop a fresh understanding of Polish Jewish civilization in all its richness and variety.Subjects discussed in depth include klezmorim and Jewish recorded music; the development of Jewish theatre in Poland, theatrical parody, and the popular poet and performer Mordechai Gebirtig; Jewish postcards in Poland and Germany; the early Yiddish popular press in Galicia and cartoons in the Yiddish press; working-class libraries in inter-war Poland; the impact of the photographs of Roman Vishniac; contemporary Polish wooden figures of Jews; and the Kraków Jewish culture festival. In addition, a Polish Jewish popular song is traced to Sachsenhausen, the badkhn (wedding jester) is rediscovered in present-day Jerusalem, and Yiddish cabaret turns up in blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and reggae garb.There are also translations from the work of two writers previously unavailable in English: excerpts from the ethnographer A. Litvin’s pioneering five-volume work Yidishe neshomes (Jewish Souls) and several chapters from the autobiography, notorious in inter-war Poland, of the writer and thief Urke Nachalnik.As in earlier volumes of Polin substantial space is also given to new research into a variety of topics in Polish Jewish studies. These include the origins of antisemitism in Poland; what is known about the presence of German forces in the vicinity of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941; and the vexed question of Jews in the communist security apparatus in Poland after 1944.The review section includes an important discussion of what should be done about the paintings in Sandomierz cathedral which represent an alleged ritual murder in the seventeenth century, and an examination of the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968.

The shtetl is one of the key concepts for our understanding of the Jewish past in Eastern Europe. Although today most Jews live in big cities, the majority of Jews in Poland historically lived in the villages and small towns known as shtetls; even as late as 1931, only 43% lived in towns with a population of more than 20,000. The shtetl was thus the main context and arena for Jewish life in Poland, but much of what we know of shtetl life still comes from literary accounts rather than historical research.This volume attempts to redress that imbalance. Among the topics covered are the Jewishness of the shtetl; Polish--Jewish relations and social relations more widely in the shtetl; inter-religious contacts; the hasidic conquest of shtetl life; cultural evolution in the shtetl; Polish shtetls under Russian rule and Soviet shtetls in the 1920s; and a contemporary account of returning to visit a shtetl. Other articles consider how shtetl life has been reflected in Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish literature.The New Views section analyses the work of the Russian Jewish writer Lev Levanda and the correspondence of an interwar Polish Jew, Wolf Lewkowicz. There are also two articles on the Gesiowka concentration camp established by the Nazis to clear the remains of the Warsaw ghetto. A special section is devoted to whether the incidents in Przytyk in 1936 constituted a pogrom, while another is devoted to discussing two important documents illustrating Wladyslaw Gomulka's attitude to Jews.

This consolidated index to the first twelve volumes of Polin will be a vital tool for scholars and students interested in any area of Polish Jewish studies. * Table of contents by volume-each volume at a glance * Chronological table of contents-each historical period at a glance * Index of persons-more than 4,500 people * Index of subjects-almost 6,000 detailed entries * Index of books reviewed * Index of contributors-listings of scholars and their contributions * Notes on contributors * A chronological table of Polish history * Maps Over the years, Polin has attracted contributions from many disciplines-among them architecture; economic, social, and political history; literature and film studies; Holocaust studies; rabbinic; sociology; women's studies; and Yiddish studies-and from a wide variety of viewpoints. Every period of Polish-Jewish history and every area of settlement has been covered, in more or less detail. Some topics have been the subject of ongoing debate in successive volumes, and the coverage of the different towns and geographical areas has likewise often extended through several volumes. However, only since the Littman Library began to publish Polin (starting from volume 8) have any indexes been provided. This long-awaited volume will greatly facilitate serious research in the field of Polish-Jewish studies.

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.

Poland today is a very different country from the Poland of the past, yet attitudes inherited from the past continue to affect Polish–Jewish relations in the present. In Poland itself, now a free society, memories of the Jewish place in Poland’s history, long suppressed by communism, are being re-evaluated. In America the attitudes that had divided the two sides in the Old Country seemed for a long time to be becoming more entrenched.This volume—probably the first comprehensive study of Polish–Jewish relations in North America—explores how this situation came about, and also considers the efforts being made to put the resentments caused by past conflicts to one side as the influences long dominant in the Polish–Jewish relationship in North America begin to lose their formative power.The contributors deal boldly with matters at the heart of the relationship. There is an attempt to quantify the attitudes of both sides to a number of key aspects of the Holocaust, and fascinating questions are raised about how the Holocaust has distorted the perceptions that Poles and Jews have of each other, and why the Holocaust remains a problem in Polish–Jewish relations. Stereotyping is confronted head-on. There is an investigation of how crude stereotypes of Polish peasants have found their way into Jewish history textbooks, crucially affecting the disposition of American Jews towards Poland, and of how the stereotyped world of the shtetl still haunts the American Jewish imagination, with great consequences for attitudes to Poles and Polish Americans. The way in which this stereotype is challenged by realities encountered in the context of the March of the Living is provocatively discussed, along with the options for dealing with a landscape ‘poor in Jews, but rich in Jewish ruins’. A number of chapters describe attempts to overcome mutual stereotyping, including a detailed and valuable account of the National Polish American–Jewish American Council, and of the attempts that have been made to steer the Jedwabne debate in a constructive direction. These small beginnings show that it is possible to go beyond past differences and to concentrate instead on what has linked Poles and Jews in their long history.As in earlier volumes of Polin, substantial space is given, in ‘New Views’, to recent research in other areas of Polish–Jewish studies.

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish–Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories in a comprehensive way. Until 1989, Polish consciousness of the Second World War subsumed the destruction of Polish Jewry within a communist narrative of Polish martyrdom and heroism. Post-war Jewish memory, by contrast, has been concerned mostly with Jewish martyrdom and heroism (and barely acknowledged the plight of Poles under German occupation). Since the 1980s, however, a significant number of Jews and Poles have sought to identify a common ground and have met with partial but increasing success, notwithstanding the new debates that have emerged in recent years concerning Polish behaviour during the Nazi genocide of the Jews that Poles had ignored for half a century. This volume considers these contentious issues from different angles.Among the topics covered are Jewish memorial projects, both in Poland and beyond its borders, the Polish approach to Holocaust memory under communist rule, and post-communist efforts both to retrieve the Jewish dimension to Polish wartime memory and to reckon with the dark side of the Polish national past. An interview with acclaimed author Henryk Grynberg touches on many of these issues from the personal perspective of one who as a child survived the Holocaust hidden in the Polish countryside, as do the three poems by Grynberg reproduced here.The ‘New Views’ section features innovative research in other areas of Polish–Jewish studies. A special section is devoted to research concerning the New Synagogue in Poznan, built in 1907, which is still standing only because the Nazis turned it into a swimming-pool.CONTRIBUTORS: Natalia Aleksiun, Assistant Professor in Eastern European Jewish History, Touo College, New York; Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Head, Section for Holocaust Studies, Centre for European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków; curator, International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum; Boaz Cohen, teacher in Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Shaanan and Western Galilee Colleges, northern Israel; Judith R. Cohen, Director of the Photographic Reference Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Gabriel N. Finder, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia; Rebecca Golbert, researcher; Regina Grol, Professor of Comparative Literature, Empire State College, State University of New York; Jonathan Huener, Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Professor of Fine Arts, New York University; Marta Kurkowska, Lecturer, Institute of History, Jagiellonian, University, Kraków; Joanna B. Michlic, Assistant Professor, Holocaust and Genocide Program, Richard Stockton College, Pomona, New Jersey; Eva Plach, Assistant Professor of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada; Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Alexander V. Prusin, Associate Professor of History, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro; Jan Schwarz, Senior Lecturer, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago; Maxim D. Shrayer, Professor of Russian and English, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages, Co-Director, Jewish Studies Program, Boston College; Michael C. Steinlauf, Professor of Jewish History and Culture, Gratz College, Pennsylvania; Robert Szuchta, History teacher, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz High School, Warsaw; Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Lecturer in Cultural Anthroplogy, Warsaw University; Chair, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Collegium Civitas, Poland; Scott Ury, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University; Bret Werb, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Seth L. Wolitz, Gale Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin.

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

In this volume of Polin, scholars from the fields of history, sociology, politics, anthropology, linguistics, literature, and folklore explore central themes in Jewish and European history. Launching what was to become a comprehensive and vigorous forum for discussion of all aspects of the Jewish experience in Poland, this first volume established the pattern of bringing together work by established and younger scholars from many countries.CONTRIBUTORS: Israel Bartal, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, David Biale, Jan Blonski, Alina Cala, Andrzej Chojnowski, David Engel, Jozef Garlinski, Jacob Goldberg, Gershon David Hundert, John D. Klier, Moshe Mishkinsky, Magdalena Opalski, M. J. Rosman, Rafael Scharf, Robert M. Seltzer, Chone Shmeruk, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Paul Wexler, Steven J. Zipperstein.

A central core of articles on Jewish Warsaw over the centuries covers the history of Jewish settlement; Jewish population in the eighteenth century; the background to the 1790 pogrom; relations with Christians in the early Partition period (1795-1861); the acculturation of the nineteenth century; Warsaw as a Yiddish literary centre; Jewish Warsaw before the First World War; the history of the Warsaw ghetto; and Warsaw Jewish historians Emanuel Ringelblum and Jacob Shatzky. Other topics covered include the religious orders and the Jews during the Holocaust, and the integration of the Jews in Radom.

The theme of this rich and highly focused volume is Polish perceptions of Jews and Jewish perceptions of Poles from the Middle Ages to the present. Essays by Leszek Kolakowski and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski set the parameters of the debate. Contributors analyse sources ranging from Yiddish folk-songs to Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish literature to Polish plays, and the discussions range over the entire period. Norman Davies writes on ethnic diversity in twentieth-century Poland, and other essays deal with related political aspects. There is also an important exchange between Stanislaus Blejwas and Shmuel Krakowski entitled 'Polemic as History'.CONTRIBUTORS Gershon C. Bacon, Israel Bartal, Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Andrzej Bryk, Michael Burleigh, Andrzej Chojnowski, Norman Davies, David Engel, M. R. D. Foot, Frank Golczewski, Adam Hetnal, Julian Ilicki, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Krystyna Kersten, Stefan Kieniewicz, Leszek Kolakowski, Pawel Korzec, Shmuel Krakowski, Jack Kugelmass, Anna Landau-Czajka, Sergiusz Michalski, Magdalena Opalski, Antony Polonsky, Eugenia Prokopowna, Peter Pulzer, Anna Radziwill, Alexandra Reiche, Murray J. Rosman, Michael C. Steinlauf, Jerzy Szapiro, Jean-Charles Szurek, Janusz Tazbir, Nechama Tec, Chava Turniansky, Roman Zimand.

In the period between the two world wars, Poland's Jewish community was second only in size to that of the United States, and was the laboratory in which the ideological orientations which dominated the Jewish world - Zionism, Bundism, Neo-Orthodoxy, Assimilation - were tested. There has been much disagreement as to the character and strength of anitsemitism in Poland at that time, and the extent to which the experience of the Jews aided the Nazis in carrying out their genocidal plans. This latest volume of Polin includes contributions from Poland, western Europe, Israel, and North America, which together provide a clearer understanding of the issues which have in the past proved so divisive. It also includes a number of personal testimonies from people who experienced the interwar period at first hand. The result is a book that will be essential reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and in the problems of ethnic minorities in post-Versailles Europe.

In the mid-1960s, public opinion in Poland turned against the Gomulka regime for a variety of reasons. In an attempt to regain public support and divert attention from the real problems, Gomulka adopted an antisemitic stance. On 19 March 1968 he delivered a speech to party activists in which he divided Jews into three categories: 'patriotic Jews', 'Zionists', and those who were neither Jews nor Poles but 'cosmopolitans', who should 'avoid those fields of work where the affirmation of nationality is indispensable'. In consequence, nearly 15,000 Jews--a very large part of Poland's Jewish community--left for Israel, western Europe, and North America, effectively ending Jewish life in the country for over a decade. The events of 1968 were long ignored by scholars but in recent years their importance in the process which led to the collapse of communism has become increasingly evident. This volume illuminates the events that triggered the crisis, the crisis itself, and its consequences. Different aspects of this are examined by Dariusz Stola, Jerzy Eisler, and Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum, while the role of the the Polish Military Intelligence Service during 1945-1961 in precipitating the crisis is analyzed by Leszek Gluchowski.Several contributors consider the background to the crisis in terms of the concerns of the Jewish community. Audrey Kichelewski describes developments in the community between the consolidation of Gomulka's power in 1957 and the outbreak of the Six Day War. Malgorzata Melchior examines how Jews who had survived in Poland during the Second World War responded to the crisis. Joanna Wiszniewicz provides a group portrait of pupils of Jewish origin in Warsaw schools in the 1960s, a milieu from which important elements in the student opposition were drawn. Karen Auerbach sharpens the focus in her consideration of the situation of Yiddish writer Naftali Herts Kon, while Holly Levitsky describes the travails of the Jewish communist writer Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. The book also reprints the testimonies of several people who lived through these painful events: Jerzy Jedlicki, Henryk Dasko, and Miroslaw Sawicki. Bozena Szaynok analyses the rhetoric of the period and examines the role of 'Israel' in the crisis. The controversies which it still arouses are reflected in the exchange between generals Pioro and Jaruzelski concerning the impact of the purge of Jewish officers from the Polish People's Army and in the responses to the publication by Piotr Gontarczyk of a report on the role of Jacek Kuron in 1968. As in previous volumes of Polin, in the section 'New Views' substantial space is also given to new research into a variety of topics in Polish-Jewish studies. These include a study by Kalman Weiser of the Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki; an reassessment by Julian Bussgang of the role of Metropolitan Sheptytsky during the Holocaust; an account by Michael Beizer and Israel Bartal of the tragic career of Moses Schorr; an evaluation by Krzysztof Czyzewski of the work of the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski; and a description of the reception in Poland of Art Spiegelman's Maus. CONTRIBUTORS Karen Auerbach, Israel Bartal, Michael Beizer, Teresa Bogucka, Julian Bussgang, Wojciech Czuchnowski, Krzysztof Czyzewski, Henryk Dasko, Jerzy Eisler, Leszek W. Gluchowski, Piotr Gontarczyk, Anna Jarmusiewicz, Wojciech Jaruszelski, Jerzy Jedlicki, Audrey Kichelewski, Holli Levitsky, Krzysztof Link-Lenczowski, Tomasz Lysak, Jacek Maj, Malgorzata Melchior, Joanna B. Michlic, Karol Modzelewski, Tadeusz Pioro, Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum, Maciej Rybinski, Dariusz Stola, Bozena Szaynok, Kalman Weiser, Joanna Wisniewicz, Tadeusz Witkowski, Piotr Wrobel, Rafal Ziemiewicz.

Boundaries—physical, political, social, religious, and cultural—were a key feature of life in medieval and early modern Poland, and this volume focuses on the ways in which these boundaries were respected, crossed, or otherwise negotiated. It throws new light on the contacts between Jews and Poles, including the vexed question of conversion and the tensions it aroused. The collected articles also discuss relations between the various elements of Jewish society—the wealthy and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, and the religious and the lay elites, considering too contacts between Jews in Poland and those in Germany and elsewhere. Classic studies by such eminent scholars as Meir Bałaban, Jacob Goldberg, and Moshe Rosman provide a foil for new research by Hanna Zaremska and David Frick, as well as Adam Teller, Magda Teter, Elisheva Carlebach, Jürgen Heyde, and Adam Kaźmierczyk. Taken together, the contributions on this central theme help redefine the Jewish history of pre-modern Poland. As ever, the New Views section examines a wide variety of other topics. These include accusations of ritual murder in nineteenth-century Poland; the Russian Jewish integrationist politician Mikhail Morgulis; the attitude of Bolesław Prus towards Jewish assimilation and his relationship with the Jewish journalist Nahum Sokolow; women in the Mizrahi movement in Poland; Polish patriotism among Jews; the impact of the first Soviet occupation of 1939–41 on Polish–Jewish relations; how the war affected the views of Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski; the shtetl in the work of American Jewish writers Allen Hoffman and Jonathan Safran Foer; and the initial Polish response to Jan Gross's Fear.

Few Polish cities have evoked more affection from their Jewish inhabitants than Kraków, and this volume brings together the work of leading historians from Israel, Poland, Great Britain, and the United States to explore how this relationship evolved. It takes as its starting point 1772, when Poland was partitioned between the Great Powers and Kraków came under Austrian rule, and examines the relationship between the Jewish minority and the Polish majority in the city in the different stages of its history down to the period of German occupation in the Second World War. An additional perspective is provided by a consideration of how Jewish life in Kraków has been remembered by Holocaust survivors, and how it is portrayed in post-war Polish literature.The main explanation for the specific nature of relations between Poles and Jews in Kraków as it emerges from these studies seems to be that Jewish acculturation to Polish culture was more pronounced in Kraków than anywhere else in Poland. The Jewish community as a whole opened itself up to contemporary currents and participated in the life of the city, above all in its cultural dimension, while nevertheless retaining a highly articulated sense of Jewish identity and unity. This meant that they were able both to defend their interests effectively and to establish links with the rest of the population from a position of strength. An additional important factor appears to have been the more tolerant atmosphere which prevailed in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which meant that ethnic tensions were less acute than elsewhere on the Polish lands. Furthermore, the fact that the city was largely pre-industrial and conservative, and was a spiritual and intellectual centre for both Catholics and Jews, may paradoxically have mitigated ethnic conflict, as did the fact that the two societies—Polish and Jewish—were largely socially separate. While the increase in antisemitism after 1935 and the consequences of the Holocaust are still etched in the minds of many, the city nevertheless has a special place in Jewish hearts and will continue to be remembered as one of the great centres of Jewish culture in east-central Europe.As in other volumes of Polin, the New Views section examines a number of important topics. These include a general investigation of the situation of the Jews in Galicia; an analysis of the position of Jewish slave labourers in the Kielce area under Nazi rule; an investigation into the resurgence after 1944 of the myth of ritual murder; and a discussion of the history of the Jewish settlement in Lower Silesia after the Second World War.

The focus is on how the Jews were affected by Polish independence in 1918. Other topics covered include Jan Blonski's article ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’; Polish historiography on the privileges granted to the Jews; the decline of the kahal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the social perception of Jews in the eighteenth century; representations of Jews in nineteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century synagogues; the Jewish Polish-language press in the interwar period; and antisemitic slogans in Endecja political campaigns.CONTRIBUTOR: Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Research Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford. Eugene C. Black, Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis University. Andrzej Bryk, Lecturer, Institute for Constitutional History, Jagiellonian. University, Kraków. Jan Blonski, Professor of the History of Polish Literature, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Sh. Cygielman, Senior History in Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-heva. David Engel, Tel Aviv University. Mieczyslaw Inglot, Professor of Polish Literature, University of Wroclaw. Paul Latawski, Assistant Professor of International Relations, New England College, Arundel. Eli Lederhendler, Lecturer in Jewish History, Tel Aviv University. George J. Lerski, Emeritus Professor of Modern European History, University of Chicago. Józef Lewandowski, Professor of History, Uppsala University. Maria and Kazimierz Pietchotka, architects and architectural historians. Edward Rogerson. Szymon Rudnicki, Docent and Deputy Director, Historical Institute, University of Warsaw. Michael G. Steinlauf, Brandeis University. Daniel Stone, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg. Bernadeta Tendyra, London School of Economics. Anna Zuk, Lecturer, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Marie Curie-Sklodkowska University, Lublin.