Jews, Communists and Jewish Communists, in Poland, Europe and Beyond (original) (raw)
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JEWISH LIVES UNDER COMMUNISM. New Perspectives
Ed. by Kateřina Čapková and Kamil Kijek. Rutgers University Press, 2022
This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.
Tearing off the masks: 1 Narratives on Jewish communists
The paper presents an analysis of the contemporary Polish debate on Jewish communists. The analysis was performed in the framework of colonialist theories. I deconstructed narrations about Jewish communists, which belong in the Polish political mainstream, and are regarded as moderate, objective and devoid of any ideology. The tropes shared by the colonialist discourse and the debate on Jewish communists are: orientalisation, eroticisation, infantilisation, presenting the object of research outside the historical context, abolishing the context of social and political inequalities, and declaring the victims guilty of the violence they experience.
A small group of Communists of Jewish origin reached senior positions in the Communist regime in Poland in 1944 and 1945. Although they were a minority among the upper echelons of the government in the new Poland, they had great presence and influence. In the struggle over Poland’s character, their Jewish origin was highlighted by opponents of the Communist regime in a vocal and aggressive campaign. This paper investigates the emergence of four members of this group, their identity formulation as Communists, and their abandoning of ties to their Jewish origins. There was no element of Judaism in their rise nor did they return to their roots with their fall. After they were fired in the mid-1950s, they sought to return to the party which had rejected them, and when this was not possible, remained on the margins of Polish society until their death. For them, the path back to Judaism was not even a realistic option.
Jews in the Communist movement in the Second Polish Republic 1918–1938: an outline of the issue
Polish-Jewish Studies, 2021
The article describes the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movement in Russia (especially in Poland) before World War I; the social structure of the Jewish population in Poland; the path of the splinter groups from Jewish left-wing parties to the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland; the attitude of Jewish radicals towards the Bolshevik aggression against Poland in 1920; the number of Jews in the Polish Communist movement, their identity, and their motives for joining the Communist movement. The share of Jews in the Polish Communist movement was several times higher than the share of the Jewish population in the society of the Second Polish Republic. Jews made up about 30 percent of all KPP members, and in the party youth group the figure reached as high as 50 percent. Activists of Jewish origin made up about 40 percent of the party elite, and they even came to predominate in the middle ranks. The reasons for the significant participation of Jews in the Communist movement cannot be explained (which is often done) solely by their difficult social situation and discrimination. Rather, it was a combination of many factors of a different nature, both universal and specifically Jewish.
How Jewish were Jewish Communists?
To appear in Jewish History Quarterly 2023; has appeared. , 2023
It is argued that all the Polish “professional” revolutionaries at the turn of the 20th century – all, not just Jews among them – formed not only a category but also a group tied by common values, relations, experiences, and a group identity. At the same time, those individuals of Jewish extractions who were active in the general, non-Jewish movement, did not feel that they formed a subgroup. While we may try to identify Jewish traits of the socialist leaders and devoted activists raised in assimilated Jewish families, we may not assume that they formed a Jewish group or were substantially Jewish just because they were Jewish by origin. In order to determine to what extent and in what sense they were Jewish, the following features of the Jewish leaders of Polish leftist parties of that era are analysed: assimilation together with the belief in its value; ‘Europeanism’; attitude to the Polish language; opposition to Jewish nationalism; idealism and highest ethical standards; identification with modernism and science; quasi-religious messianic Marxism. If some of these attributes are seen as Jewish, it is Jewishness of a highly paradoxical nature. Generally, the reasons for which some assimilated Jews became radical leftists and later communists were mostly social, had to do with their marginal status, but their involvement was significantly coloured by their Jewish heritage. While the leftist leaders who were Jewish by origin could have gone back to Jewish life, none of them did. However, some of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren did. This recent development makes it easier to include their ancestors into the annals of Jewish history.
Jewish Initiative and Agency under Communism final conference program
2022
Throughout most of the XX century in the Soviet Union and from 1945 in East Central European "people’s democracies," citizens, including Jews, were objects of the arbitrary policies of the communist states. The authoritarian model severely restricted political subjectivity, initiative or agency on the part of its citizens. It is thus not surprising that decades of historical research on the Jews under communist regimes studied the Jews first and foremost as victims of the policies of communist states and their various institutions. More recently, two decades of research on Jews in the Soviet Union has altered this paradigm. New historical, sociological, ethnographic and literary research has revealed various instances where forms of resistance or innovative reactions by individual Jews or Jewish institutions to “Jewish policies” of the state produced unintended effects. While much research on this topic is still required with regard to the different parts of USSR, there is even more work to be done regarding other countries of the post-1945 communist bloc. The goal of the conference is to inspire and to gather together scholars who are working on project with related questions and perspectives. Conference organizers are inviting researchers from the field of Jewish history and culture under communism. The conference organizers welcome research covering all aspects of Jewish life, including everyday experience, culture in the wider context (literature, theater, film), autobiographies, etc. We ask all the conference participants to prepare papers related to the problems of Jewish agency, subjectivity, or Jewish contributions to the transformation of communist societies. We invite conference participants to focus their research on answering one or more of the following questions: - Were there initiatives of Jewish individuals or institutions which enabled re-negotiation of the relationship between the state administration and the Jewish population despite the restricted legal setting imposed on the Jews and the society as the whole? Where can we find spaces of Jewish (relative) freedom under communism Should research on Jewish agency under communism include inquiries on Jewish participation in the security, intelligence or other such organs of the communist states? If yes, how should we approach this problem? What was the meaning of the Holocaust experience and of Holocaust memory for Jewish subjectivity and agency under post-1945 communist regimes? - What are the examples and nature of mutual influences between the Jews and their wider social, political (ideology and praxis) or cultural surroundings in communist period? What were transnational/trans-border relations among Jewish communities in various communist states and with communities from the other side of the "Iron Curtain"? - Can we identify any elements of continuity from the pre-communist epochs in Jewish activities, social and cultural patterns of behavior, or reactions toward the communist reality? What elements of Jewish tradition were still relevant in the new realities of communist rule and which were suppressed or re-negotiated? - What is the significance of the "global turn" in contemporary historiography for research on Jewish history under communism? How may research on Jewish agency under communism better serve the integration of Jewish history with histories of other Eastern European communities of the same period? We invite papers related to particular communist countries; comparative research among them; and specific case studies, local histories, or biographical research. The goal of the conference is to discuss the above-mentioned issues and to set new directions in the study of Jewish history and culture under Communism.
SIMON (Shoah: Intervention. Menthods. Documentation), Vol. 10, No. 3, 2023
This article is a microhistorical study of the activity of Commissar for the Productivisation of the Jewish Population that took place in the Jewish community of Reichenbach/ Dzierżoniów in the years 1946-1947. By studying the activity of communist Jewish Commissar, Simcha Intrator, in the very unique milieu of Dzierżoniów (town in former German territories of which half of the population consisted of Polish Jews in the summer of 1946)this article shows the role of prewar continuations in post-Holocaust Polish Jewish life. As I claim, in the specific social and cultural climate of Dzierżoniów, Simcha Intator, nominated to help to mould the Jewish community according to the communist model, acted against the prerogatives of his institutions, strengthening non-communist, pluralistic elements of local Jewish life. Thus, this article is a microhistorical study of the role of continuation of older norms and traditions in the postwar socio-political subjectivity of the Polish Jewish community.
European Journal of Jewish Studies, 2007
On the basis of an analysis of literary texts by Polish-Jewish authors, the character of the Communist Jews, their motivations and relations to Jewish and Polish culture is described. This topic involves at the same time the forms of Jewish selfrepresentation and self-consciousness, and the role played by Polonized Jews within Polish society. The article opens with a brief sketch of the possible affinities between Jewish Messianism and revolutionary utopia. * * * They were revolutionaries, rebels, refugees, and soldiers, tailors, shoemakers, intellectuals, and apparatchiks, triumphant builders of Communism and victims of his wrath. Their lives mirror five decades
2005
QUESTIONS RAISED BY KICHKO BOOK An event that provokes open criticism of the Soviet Union by Communist parties in the West is clearly one that goes beyond the divergent points of view that nowadays are known to have unpublicised existence on many levels in internal relations of the Communist movement. The publication by the Ukrainian Academy of Science of Trofim Korneyevich Kichko's "Judaism Without Embellishment" (also rendered as "Judaism Unmasked" and "Judaism in its True Colours") was such an event. The book shocked public opinion by its crude anti-semitism; it was featured in leading articles in prominent newspapers throughout the world, and was sharply condemned by friends as well as opponents of the Soviet Union; it drew unprecedented public censure from Western Communist leaders and the western Communist press to whom it was clearly in profound breach of principle. Antisemitism arouses disgust and the fact that such a book could appear in the Soviet Union with the imprint of a national scientific institution is bound to pose searching questions. How characteristic is this anti-semitism? What part does it play in official Soviet attitudes to Jews? What are the Soviet authorities doing to combat it? It has been clear for some time that the growing crisis of Jews in the U.S.S.R. and the discrimination practised against them was leading the Soviet authorities into a direct confrontation with their closest Western supporters. The problem has been festering under the surface for years, periodically breaking out in a rash of guarded criticisms in one or another Communist journal published in France, Belgium, South America, the United States, and elsewhere, and resulting in discreet expulsions, resignations or the silencing of insistent protesters. In Britain, the prominent Jewish Communist and mathematician Hyman Levy was expelled on technical grounds of indiscipline to Party orders after the publication of his pamphlet "Jews and the National Question," which argued that Soviet treatment of the Jewish minority was a mistaken application of Marxist ideology; the Jewish committee of the Party was disbanded and a new one appointed on account of the obstinately critical stand the committee had adopted; in Canada, the Communist leader J. B. Salsberg resigned after a visit to the U.S.S.R. and conversations with Mr. Khrushchev, Mr. Suslov and other prominent Soviet officials; Dr. Chaim Sloves, a Yiddish playwright and member of the French Communist Party, sought unavailingly to publish in France his disquieting impressions of a fact-finding visit to the Soviet Union, which eventually appeared about a year later in a pro-Communist Yiddish journal Yiddish Kultur,