"A Partisan from Vilna" is the memoir of Rachel Margolis, the sole survivor of her family, who escaped from the Vilna Ghetto with other members of the resistance movement, the FPO (United Partisan Organization), and joined the Soviet partisans in the forests of Lithuania to sabotage the Nazis. Beginning with an account of Rachel's life as a precocious, privileged girl in pre-war Vilna, it goes on to detail life in the Vilna Ghetto, including the development and struggles of the FPO against the Nazis. Finally, the book chronicles the escape of a group of FPO members into the forest of Belorussia, where Rachel became a partisan fighter. Rachel Margolis received a Ph.D. in biology in and taught until the late 1980's. She then co-founded Lithuania's only real Holocaust museum, the Green House in Vilnius. She is also responsible for the discovery and transcription of the Kazimierz Sakowicz diary, published here in the US under the title, "Ponary Diary: A Bystander's Account of Mass Murder" (Yale University Press, 2004). The book opens with an introductory essay by renowned Polish historian, Antony Polonsky.

This book is the first to deal with the impact on the Jews of the area of the sovietization of Eastern Poland. Polish resentment at alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets between 1939 and 1941 affected the development of Polish-Jewish relations under Nazi rule and in the USSR. The role of these conflicts both in the Anders army and in the Communist-led Kosciuszko division and 1st Polish Army is investigated, as well as the part played by Jews in the communist-dominated regime in Poland after 1944.

This volume is made up of essays in first presented as papers at the conference held in May 2015 at the POLIN museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw is divided into two sections. The first deals with museological questions-the voices of the curators, comments on the museum and discussions of museums and education. The second examines the current state of the historiography of the Jews on the Polish lands from the first Jewish settlement to the present-day. Making use of the leading scholars in the field from Poland, Western Europe, North America and Israel, the volume provides a definitive overview of the history and culture of one of the most important communities in the long history of the Jewish people.

"A Partisan from Vilna" is the memoir of Rachel Margolis, the sole survivor of her family, who escaped from the Vilna Ghetto with other members of the resistance movement, the FPO (United Partisan Organization), and joined the Soviet partisans in the forests of Lithuania to sabotage the Nazis. Beginning with an account of Rachel's life as a precocious, privileged girl in pre-war Vilna, it goes on to detail life in the Vilna Ghetto, including the development and struggles of the FPO against the Nazis. Finally, the book chronicles the escape of a group of FPO members into the forest of Belorussia, where Rachel became a partisan fighter. Rachel Margolis received a Ph.D. in biology in and taught until the late 1980's. She then co-founded Lithuania's only real Holocaust museum, the Green House in Vilnius. She is also responsible for the discovery and transcription of the Kazimierz Sakowicz diary, published here in the US under the title, "Ponary Diary: A Bystander's Account of Mass Murder" (Yale University Press, 2004). The book opens with an introductory essay by renowned Polish historian, Antony Polonsky.

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.

This volume is a brief history of the Jewish community of Volodymyr-Volynsky, going back to its first historical mentions. It explores Jewish settlement in the city, the kahal, and the role of the community in the Vaad Arba Aratsot, and profiles several important historical figures, including Shelomoh of Karlin and Khane-Rokhl Werbermacher (the Maiden of Ludmir). It also considers the city's synagogues and Jewish cemetery, and explores the twentieth-century history of the community, especially during the Holocaust. Drawing on survivor eyewitness testimonies, the author pays tribute to the town's Righteous among the Nations and describes efforts to preserve the memory of its Jewish community, including the creation of the Piatydni memorial, and lists prominent Jews born in Volodymyr-Volynsky and natives of the city living abroad. This book will be of interest to historians of the Jewish communities and the Holocaust in Ukraine, as well as to the general reader.

"Neighbors"--Jan Gross's stunning account of the brutal mass murder of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors--was met with international critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States. It has also been, from the moment of its publication, the occasion of intense controversy and painful reckoning. This book captures some of the most important voices in the ensuing debate, including those of residents of Jedwabne itself as well as those of journalists, intellectuals, politicians, Catholic clergy, and historians both within and well beyond Poland's borders.

Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic introduce the debate, focusing particularly on how "Neighbors" rubbed against difficult old and new issues of Polish social memory and national identity. The editors then present a variety of Polish voices grappling with the role of the massacre and of Polish-Jewish relations in Polish history. They include samples of the various strategies used by Polish intellectuals and political elites as they have attempted to deal with their country's dark past, to overcome the legacy of the Holocaust, and to respond to Gross's book.

"The Neighbors Respond" makes the debate over "Neighbors" available to an English-speaking audience--and is an excellent tool for bringing the discussion into the classroom. It constitutes an engrossing contribution to modern Jewish history, to our understanding of Polish modern history and identity, and to our bank of Holocaust memory.

This volume provides a comprehensive and much-needed survey of the millennium-long history of Jews in the Ukrainian lands. The book challenges the stereotyped vision of the relationship between Jews and Ukrainians and offers in-depth studies of key periods and issues. The survey opens with a consideration of early Jewish settlements and the local reactions to these. The focus then moves to the period after 1569, when control of the fertile lands of Ukraine passed to the Polish nobility. Because it was largely Jews in the service of the nobility who administered these lands, they were inevitably caught up in the resentment that Polish rule provoked among the local population, and, above all, among the Cossacks and peasant-serfs. This resentment culminated in the great revolt led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the mid-17th century, in consequence of which the Jews were excluded from that part of Ukraine which eventually came under Russian rule when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned. The Jewish response to the establishment of Russian and Austrian rule in the areas of Ukraine that had formerly been in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a second major theme of the book, and particularly the Jewish reaction to the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism and the subsequent Ukrainian struggle for independence. A third overarching theme is the impact of the sovietization of Ukraine on Jewish-Ukrainian relations, with a chapter devoted to the 1932-33 Famine (Holodomor) in which millions perished. The book also gives special attention to the growing rift between Jews and Ukrainians triggered by the rise of radical nationalism among Ukrainians living outside the Soviet Union and by conflicting views of Germany's genocidal plans regarding the Jews during World War II. With contributions from leading Jewish and Ukrainian scholars on these complex and highly controversial topics, the book places Jewish-Ukrainian relations in a broader historical context and adds to the growing literature that seeks to go beyond the old paradigms of conflict and hostility. CONTRIBUTORS: Howard Aster, formerly taught Political Science, McMaster University; Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ivan Dzyuba, Ukrainian writer and literary critic; member, National Academy of Science of Ukraine; former Ukrainian Minister of Culture; Amelia Glaser, Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego; John-Paul Himka, Professor, Department of History, University of Alberta; Judith Kalik, teaches East European History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Myron Kapral, Director, Lviv Branch, Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Vladimir (Ze'ev) Khanin, Chief Adviser on Research and Strategic Planning, Ministry of Absorption, Israel; Victoria Khiterer, Assistant Professor of History and Director, Conference on the Hilocaust and Genocide, Millersville University, Pennsylvania; Taras Koznarsky, Associate Professor, University of Toronto Sergey R. Kravtsov, Research Fellow, Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Taras Kurylo, independent scholar, Calgary; Alexander J. Motyl, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University-Newark; Jakub Nowakowski, Director, Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow; Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath, Associate Professor and Academy Research Fellow, Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities, Stockholm; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History, Northwestern University; Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Peter J. Potichnyj, Honorary Professor, East China University, Shanghai and Lviv Polytechnic National University; Professor Emeritus, McMaster University; Mykola Ryabchuk, Ukrainian writer and journalist; Vice President, Ukrainian PEN-Club; Raz Segal, doctoral student, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University; teaching fellow, International MA Program in Holocaust Studies, Haifa University; Dan Shapira, Professor of Ottoman Studies and Professor of the History and Culture of Eastern European Jewry, Bar-Ilan University; Myroslav Shkandrij, Professor of Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba; Mykola Iv. Soroka, Advancement Manager, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta; Yevhen Sverstyuk, theologian, translator, journalist, and literary critic; Chief Editor, Nas.

For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, with nearly three million more in the Soviet Union. Yet although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and a large proportion of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, and many of the major movements that have characterized the Jewish world in recent times have their origins there, the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing that fails both to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization that emerged there and to illustrate what was lost in its destruction: Jewish life in these parts, though often poor materially, was marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and creativity. Antony Polonsky re-creates this lost world - brutally cut down by the Holocaust and seriously damaged by the Soviet attempt to destroy Jewish culture - in a study that avoids both sentimentalism and the simplification of the east European Jewish experience into a story of persecution and martyrdom. It is an important story whose relevance reaches far beyond the Jewish world or the bounds of east-central Europe, and Professor Polonsky succeeds in providing a comprehensive overview that highlights the realities of Jewish life while also setting them in the context of the political, economic, and social realities of the time. He describes not only the towns and shtetls where the Jews lived, the institutions they developed, and their participation in the economy, but also their vibrant religious and intellectual life, including the emergence of hasidism and the growth of opposition to it from within the Jewish world. By the late eighteenth century other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews, and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the Haskalah movement that was to revolutionize the Jewish world. Polonsky looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. He then shows how the deterioration in the position of the Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements - Zionism, socialism, and autonomism - as well as the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He also examines Jewish urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part of the volume deals with the twentieth century. Starting from the First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, it looks in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second World War. It then reviews Polish - Jewish relations during the war and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust. The final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of communism. This is an abridged version of a three-volume hardback edition which won the 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies (awarded by the American Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) and also the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize for the best book on the history of Poland published in a foreign language between 2007 and 2011 (a prize established by the Polish Senate and awarded by the Polish Historical Association).

This volume of Polin, based on scholarship that has emerged since the fall of communism, is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania. Focusing on the specific character of Lithuanian Jewry, the volume opens by examining how their relationship with the surrounding society developed after 1772, both under tsarist rule and then in independent Lithuania. Moving to more recent times, the devastating impact on the Jewish community of the Soviet and Nazi occupations during the Second World War is discussed, as are the further negative consequences on Jewish life of the reoccupation of the country by the Soviets between 1944 and 1990. The volume concludes with material on the slow revival of Jewish life since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of an independent Lithuania, which was accompanied by the revival of many disciplines, such as the study of Jewish history, repressed by Soviet censorship. This revived interest in the country's Jewish past is now playing a key role in the broader transformation of historical memory of the post-Soviet era and the problem of coming to terms with the widespread local collaboration in Lithuania during the Holocaust - a process which has led to important scholarly advances but also to bitter controversy. Collectively, the studies in this volume contribute to a better understanding of the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania and of Lithuanian - Jewish relations and constitute a part of the necessary process of creating a more rounded and inclusive history of the country. CONTRIBUTORS Aelita Ambruleviciute, Marta Aleksandra Balinska, Egle Bendikaite, Michael Casper, Ellen Cassedy, Immanuel Etkes, David E. Fishman, Jack Jacobs, Grigory Kanovich, Saulius Suziedelis, Andrey Krotau, Larisa Lempertiene, Aearunas Liekis, Miriam Offer, Avi Ohry, Karin Ohry-Kossoy, Ausra Pazeraite, Antony Polonsky, Anna P. Ronell, Vladas Sirutavicius, Darius Staliunas, Saulius SuA iedelis, Vytautas Toleikis, Anna Verschik, Theodore R. Weeks, Mordechai Zalkin.

Few Polish cities have evoked more affection from their Jewish inhabitants than Krakow, 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 Krakow 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 Krakow 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 Krakow as it emerges from these studies seems to be that Jewish acculturation to Polish culture was more pronounced in Krakow 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.

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 Balaban, 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, Jurgen Heyde, and Adam Kazmierczyk. 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 Boleslaw 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 Slonimski; 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."

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.

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, Krakow. Jan Blonski, Professor of the History of Polish Literature, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. 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. Jozef 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.

Published in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, this volume has a special section with memoirs and other material dealing with aspects of Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Topics covered in other articles include the autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer, entitled 'From the Ghetto to Modern Culture'; Jan Czynski and the question of equal rights for all religious faiths; education of Jewish women in the nineteenth century; ritual slaughter as a political issue; and the Jewish press in Krakow in the inter-war years. Contributors: Zygmunt Bauman, Czeslaw Brzoza, Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, Anna Clarke, Adam Galkowski, Jan Marek Gronski, Dora Katzenelson, Mark W. Kiel, Ariel Joseph Kochavi, Jerzy Lewinski, Zenon Nowak, Laura Quercioli, Richie Robertson, Marek Rudnicki, Szymon Rudnicki, Shaul Stampfer, Aharon Weiss, Tomasz Wisniewski, Josef Wrobel, Aleksander Zyga

'The less antisemitism exists among Christians, the easier it will be to unite the social forces . . . and the sooner workers' solidarity will emerge: solidarity of all who are exploited and wronged . . . Jew, Pole, Lithuanian.' Jozef Pilsudski, 1903 The Socialist ideals of brotherhood, equality, and justice have exercised a strong attraction for many Jews. On the Polish lands, Jews were drawn to Socialism when the liberal promise of integration into the emergent national entities of east and central Europe as Poles or Lithuanians or Russians of the Hebrew faith seemed to be failing. For those Jews seeking emancipation from discrimination and the constraints of a religious community, Socialism offered a tantalizing new route to integration in the wider society. Some Jews saw in Socialism a secularized version of the age-old Jewish messianic longing, while others were driven to the Socialist movement by poverty and the hope that it would supply their material needs. But in Poland as elsewhere in Europe, Socialism failed to transcend national divisions. The articles in this volume of Polin investigate the failure of this ideal and its consequences for Jews on the Polish lands, examining Socialist attitudes to the 'Jewish question', the issue of antisemitism, how the growth of Socialism affected relationships between Poles and Jews, and the character of Jewish Socialist groups in Poland. The result is a significant contribution to the history of Jews in Poland. It also sheds light on the history of Socialism in east-central Europe and the complexity of national problems there. Editors and contributors: Israel Bartal, Daniel Blatman, Alina Cala, Stephen D. Corrsin, David Engel, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Gershon Hundert, Ross Kessel, Shmuel Krakowski, Dov Levin, Pawel Machcewicz, Stanislaw Meducki, Erica Nadelhaft, Magdalena Opalska, Richard Pipes, Antony Polonsky, Dina Porat, Teresa Prekerowa, Michal Sliwa, Janusz Sujecki, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Barbara Wachowska.

This volume focuses on Polish Jews in Germany; Zionism in Poland; and art and architecture. More specifically, this latter section considers the physical impact of the Jewish presence in Polish towns-in general, and in Gora Kalwaria, home to the Gerer hasidic dynasty; there is also a map of synagogue buildings still standing in 1988 and an inventory showing their current use, and an illustrated article on recent Jewish monuments in Warsaw. Several of the remaining articles relate to Polish or Yiddish literature. Contributors: Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Jozef Adelson, Mark Baker, Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Eleonora Bergman, Andrzej S. Ciechanowiecki, Artur Eisenbach, John P. Fox, Jedrzej Giertych, Joseph Goldstein, Karel Grunberg, Jan Jagielski, Stanislaw Jankowski, Paul Latawski, Krystyn Matwijowski, Jadwiga Maurer, Moshe Mishkinsky, Israel Oppenheim, Adam Penkalla, Maria and Kazimierz Pietchotka, Krzysztof Pilarczyk, Tomasz Polanski, Laura Quercioli-Mincer, Chone Shmeruk, Laurence Weinbaum

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, Krakow; 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, Krakow; 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.

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.

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 Lodz 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 Lodz. 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

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.

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.