Antisemitism in Poland today (original) (raw)
Related papers
Antisemitism in Poland: Economic, Religious, and Historical Aspects
The article discusses the phenomenon of antisemitic prejudice in Poland after 1989. The comparative cross-national data suggests that prejudice against Jewish people remains visible in Poland independent of the difficult history of Polish-Jewish relations. The studies reviewed in this article present potential causes and mechanisms of anti-Jewish attitudes in Poland, such as relative deprivation, victimhood-based national identity, and authoritarian political attitudes.
Democracy and Its Discontents: The Image of "the Jews" and the Transformation of Polish Politics
Ch. 6 of Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry, Stanford University Press, 2012
This chapter argues that the introduction of antisemitic rhetoric and politics into the political mainstream during the elections to the State Dumas of 1906 and 1907 proved to be a critical turning point in the history of antisemitism in Poland and in the history of Polish-Jewish relations.
Antisemitism in Contemporary Poland
2013
At the Hoover Institution, I found a space where academic freedom, debate, and discussion is not only permitted but truly encouraged. This is crucial during these times, especially in relation to the study of contemporary antisemitism. I am also thankful to Raphael Fischler, Doron Ben-Atar, Shalem Coulibaly, Jeffrey Herf, and Olufemi Vaughan. I am especially grateful to all the scholars who attended the conference. Most of them did so at their own expense and traveled considerable distances to be there. The conference, on which this series is based, was the largest academic gathering ever on the study of antisemitism. More than one hundred speakers from approximately twenty academic fields and more then twenty countries attended the event. It was truly a remarkable gathering at an important historical moment. Due to the high level of scholarship, the conference produced many key insights and has given rise to many important research projects. Finally, I would like to thank Daniel Stephens for copy-editing and reviewing the contributions for this project. I am most grateful for his professionalism, patience, and assistance, often beyond the call of duty. Without his efforts these volumes would not have been possible. I am thankful to Alan Stephens for his much-valued advice and for making this publication possible in the first place. I am also most grateful to Lauren Clark and would like to thank
Patterns of Prejudice, 2017
Marzec investigates socialist strategies in relationship to antisemitism during the 1905–7 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. An extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals a dialogical differentiation of political identities and ideological positions. Antisemitism was an important political device used by the National Democracy party (Endecja) to assist in the construction of a new national identity. It represented a certain discursive binary logic that ushered in a need for a negatively perceived and threatening ‘outside’. Jews easily became the focus of this mechanism due to the particular sociodemographic conjuncture of events as well as older, more established Judaeophobic tendencies. This antisemitism was, for the same structural reasons, questioned and rejected by the socialist parties that were struggling to maintain class unity. For socialists, the need to prevent the redirection of class anger into ethnic animosities and to secure the united struggle of Polish and Jewish workers were matters of life and death. While general antisemitic attitudes may be perceived as more common in Russian Poland than in Western Europe, nevertheless domestic socialists of all parties and denominations remained firmly against antisemitism and did not accept the ‘economic Jew’ stereotype that was often a hidden undercurrent of anti-capitalism at the time. A broader overview of the genealogy of divisions among Polish radicals from the 1880s and 1890s and afterwards, up until the tragic rise of antisemitism from 1910 onwards, demonstrates that an anti-antisemitic strategy was adopted, and subsequently kept in place, as the most viable political identity in the given social and political situation. It remained unsuccessful, however, and some socialist writers started to distance themselves from the earlier, virtually unanimous, anti-antisemitic stance.
IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED in 1986 and provocatively titled "Interwar Poland: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews?" Ezra Mendel sohn observed that in the historiography of interwar Polish Jewry there are two camps, one "optimistic," the other "pessimistic." He continued: The attitude of most Jewish scholars has been, and continues to be, that interwar Poland was an extremely antisemitic country, perhaps even uniquely antisemitic. They claim that Polish Jewry during the 1920s and 1930s was in a state of constant and alarm ing decline, and that by the 1930s both the Polish regime and Polish society were waging a bitter and increasingly successful war against the Jewish population.' This was the point of view of the surviving prewar Polish-Jewish scholars, such as Raphael Mahler, Jacob Lestchinsky, and Isaiah Trunk.^ Similar views have been expressed by a postwar Polish-Jewish historian, PawefKorzec, and by a number of Israeli historians, includ ing Moshe Landau, Shlomo Netzer, and Emanuel Meltzer.^ This ap proach is most clearly manifested in Celia Heller's book, On the Edge of Destruction (New York: Schocken, 1977). In Heller's view, the peri od between the two world wars was a rehearsal for the Holocaust. By 1939 Polish actions had pushed the Jews to "the edge of destruction," and it only remained for the Nazis to complete what the Poles had be gun. This "pessimistic" evaluation of the situation of Jews in interwar Poland has been challenged by non-Jewish (mostly Polish) historians, and by some Jewish historians as well. The most eloquent of the Jewish "optimists" is Joseph Marcus. Marcus, a supporter of the Orthodox Agudas Yisroel Party, reserves his greatest condemnation for those he refers to as the "reformers" of Jewish life in Poland. Blinded by their Zionist and socialist obsessions, he says, they had a great deal to do with the economic decline of Polish Jewry. According to Marcus, Jews in Poland were able to hold their own economically and were, in fact, better off than the majority of the population; they were more than ca pable of withstanding the assaults to which they were subjected in the
Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobótka, 2024
The article presents the fate of the Jewish population settled in Lower Silesia, Poland, during the anti-Semitic campaign of 1967-1968, focusing on two towns: Dzierżoniów and Bielawa. Through an analysis of archival sources, the text reconstructs the fate of individual members of this community, including its leaders, beginning in 1967 (during the Six-Day War) and continuing through the following months, till the events of March 1968. The paper takes a special interest in the attitudes of Jews towards Poland, as well as in the government anti-Semitic campaign and accusations of disloyalty to Poland. It also presents the experiences of hostility, as well as the consequences of stigmatization by anti-Semitism. The analysis exemplifies the impact of the anti-Semitic campaign on a small, provincial Jewish community, living far from Warsaw and the student protests in 1968 or the centre of communist authority.
East European Politics & Societies , 2014
On 30 December 1922, Eligiusz Niewiadomski, the murderer of Poland’s first president, Gabriel Narutowicz, was tried and sentenced to death. The execution was duly carried out on 31 January 1923. The trial of Niewiadomski was one of the most important and galvanizing judicial proceedings in the history of the Second Republic. According to the historiography, Niewiadomski was universally perceived as a “lunatic” or “madman” and his actions were a political setback and embarrassment for the Polish radical right. During the trial, Niewiadomski evinced no contrition for his crime and claimed that his deed was the expression of “the conscience and offended dignity of the nation.” In this article, I will present the argument that shortly after his trial, the right wing publicists’ and politicians’ judgment of Niewiadomski underwent a profound transformation. Far from being condemned as a “madman” or “murderer,” Niewiadomski assumed the position of a “tragic hero” who may have broken the letter of the law but who had done so in the name of just principles, which deserved recognition and approval. The pivotal event in this transformation was the rabidly anti-Semitic speech delivered by Niewiadomski during his trial. The paper analyzes the coverage of the trial and execution in the press in order to arrive at an understanding of precisely how the Polish right was able to reclaim Niewiadomski as one of its own so quickly despite his grave crime. It also analyzes the meaning of this transformation and its significance for understanding the nationalist right in Poland and, more broadly, interwar Polish politics as a whole.