How can the rise to power of the far-right in Poland in 2015 be explained? Was it the result of an effective propaganda strategy? Or because of the refugee crisis? Michal Kozlowski discusses the underlying causes and consequences of this new political situation within the European Union.
In Poland, one can purchase a strange good luck charm to become rich: the picture of a Jew holding a gold coin. What is the significance of this popular re-appropriation of the figure of the Jew in the context of post-Holocaust Poland? And how conscious are anti-Semitic prejudices in this representation?
Against the widespread idea that the American population remained indifferent to the genocide of European Jews, Catherine Collomp traces the history of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and its action to raise awareness on Nazism, but also to save many Jewish lives in France and Poland.
In order to tell the history of the communist period, Poland created a mechanism that is uniquely Eastern European: an Institute of National Remembrance, which combines legal investigations with scholarly research. Though it was created for political reasons, the Institute has become a fixture of Poland’s academic and historiographical landscape.
Until now, the Warsaw Ghetto archives were known to only a few specialists. The American historian Samuel Kassow presents them in a new light—as the work of a team whose mission was to describe the daily life of a community as it was being exterminated.
Is it possible to be at the same time a victim, a perpetrator, and a bystander of the Holocaust? What were the different attitudes of the Poles toward their Jewish neighbors before, during, and after the massive deportations of 1942? Relying on new sources, three recent books by American and Polish scholars throw new light on questions that are still hotly debated today.
Few academics have taken seriously the contents of the talk and tales that found popular anti-Semitism past and present in Poland. In an arresting book, anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir retraces the phenomenon back to its roots on the strength of a study of the “blood libels” revolving around Host profanations, child kidnapping and ritual murders. An exploration of the Polish catholic subconscious.
