Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture by Mariusz Kałczewiak

2021 ◽  
Vol 105 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 299-300
Author(s):  
Amy Kerner
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Polish Jews

Next Year in Drohobych

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen C. Underhill
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Polish Culture ◽  
Bruno Schulz

In Israeli director Yael Bartana’s 2007 film Mary Koszmary—meaning “Bad Dreams” or “Nightmares”—a young Polish politician delivers a resounding speech to an empty, crumbling, communist-era Stadion Dziesięciolecia in Warsaw. The speech, he says, is an appeal: “This is a call. . . . It is an appeal for life. We want three million Jews to return to Poland, to live with us again. We need you! Please come back!” This article considers the powerful and perhaps disturbing premise of these lines and explores their possible meanings in a contemporary Polish context. What can it mean for Poles and Polish culture to need Jews—and in particular, to need those Jews who can never return? The complex phenomenon of Jewish memory in Poland and Eastern Europe cannot be contained within specific, present-day borders—whether of geography or of academic discipline: similar dynamics to those Bartana has identified in Poland exist throughout the region. Thus, against the background of Bartana’s film, the article considers the growing phenomenon and importance of local Jewish festivals in Poland and present-day Ukraine, focusing in detail on two specific festivals: the annual festival “Encounters with Jewish Culture,” held in Chmielnik, Poland, and the biannual Bruno Schulz Festival in Drohobych, Ukraine. The analysis explores ways that the memory of Polish Jews—and more specifically the figure of the absent Polish Jew—can function as a central element in the construction of new, communal Polish and Ukrainian narratives since the fall of Communism.

Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydów polskich w XIXi XXwieku

2003 ◽  
pp. 518-521
Author(s):  
Jerzy Malinowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Jewish Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Polish Art

This chapter focuses on Jerzy Malinowski's Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydów polskich w XIX i XX wieku (The Painting and Sculpture of Polish Jews in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Among the men Jerzy Malinowski, an authority on Polish art and Polish Jewish culture, discusses are many unknown or virtually unknown artists. He begins his story in the mid-nineteenth century with the appearance of the first Polish artists of Jewish origin, of whom Aleksander Lesser was the most important. This was an easy decision, but other decisions made by the author are more difficult and more problematic. What exactly does he mean by Polish Jewish artists? More significant is the question of what Malinowski means by ‘Jewish artists’ and ‘Jewish art’. In his very brief introduction, he explains that he has included artists who identified themselves as belonging to the Jewish national camp, and artists who, even if they did not identify themselves in this way, took an active part in Jewish life. Those who qualify on neither of these grounds are branded as ‘assimilationists’ and omitted.

scholarly journals Making a Home in Poland: Photographic Education and Practices in the Landkentnish Movement

Images ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-179
Author(s):  
Gil Pasternak ◽  
Marta Ziętkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Jews

Abstract This article studies the photographic methods that the Poland-based Landkentnish (Yiddish for “knowing the land”) movement employed in the interwar period to promote Jewish culture and Poland as a home for the Jewish people. The movement wished to increase the exposure of Polish Jews to Poland’s diverse landscapes in order to strengthen their connection to the Polish land. It also aspired to create archives of local Jewish cultural heritage to attest to the long history of Polish Jewry and to the contributions that Jews had made to Polish society. After tracing the movement’s origins, the article explores the concentrated efforts that it made to provide its members with photographic knowledge and education. Analyzing the photographic sources and resources that the movement created, the exhibitions that it put on display, and its employment of snapshots, the article demonstrates how photography assisted the movement in realizing its key aims and objectives.

scholarly journals Jews of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1918–1939

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Szymon Rudnicki ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Closed Group ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Polish Government

In no other country were Jews, proportionally, such a huge minority as in Poland. Religiously, economically, and politically Jews varied a great deal. They were an urban and closed group which kept only economic contacts with the rest of the population. In the Polish state they had to struggle for equal rights. Anti-Semitism propagated by nationalists was very powerful. In the second half of the 1930s the Polish government (sanacja) adopted the nationalists’ slogans and tried to restrict the Jews’ economic activity. An expression for the modernization of the Jews was the emergence, in the end of the nineteenth century, of a Jewish intelligentsia. Political parties were established and represented both the Polish state and Jewish national movements. Polish Jews created a rich trilingual culture in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish. The second Polish Republic can be considered a golden era for Jewish culture in Poland.

A Polish Weininger? The Case of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953)

2010 ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Krzywiec
Keyword(s):  
The Holocaust ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Religious Reasons

The life of Julian Unszlicht (1883–1953) illustrates the case and process of the assimilation of Polish Jews. However, Unszlicht’s case is special as it shows that holding anti-Semitic views, which were to be a ticket to a Catholic society, guaranteed neither putting the roots down permanently nor gaining a new identity. The biography of a priest-convert allows to look closer at the processes of effacement and convergence of anti-Jewish rhetoric. The modern one, of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, with Catholic anti-Judaism, which was constantly excused by religious reasons and at the same time, it often spread to the ethnic-racial mental grounds. Contrary to common definitions and distinctions, those two ways of thinking perfectly complemented and strengthened each other, both living using the other’s reasoning. The Holocaust added a tragic punch line to the embroiled story of the priest-convert

Fagin's Coin of Truth: Economic Belief and Representation inOliver Twist

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Keith Clavin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Secondary Markets ◽  
Jewish Culture

This essay examines Fagin from Oliver Twist as a villain whose construction joins Victorian anxieties about counterfeiting and economic deceptiveness with separate yet related concerns about the author's role in representing criminal life. Dickens triangulates Fagin's identity through cultural fears about Jewish participation within secondary markets, increased distance between purchaser and seller in an expanding credit economy, and moral ambiguities in respect to fiction-making. Read against non-literary Victorian writing about counterfeiters and crime, Fagin can be understood as a forger of identities and narratives. His ability to exploit interpersonal belief and economic value is a central feature of his villainy and one with precedent in other aspects of Victorian financial life. Dickens critiques capitalist culture by associating it with the imitative, fictional, and Jewish culture. In contrast, he aligns sincerity and truth with the middle-class, normative characters. Throughout, he marks the distinction between these two groups with comic incidence. The marginalised figures are fodder for humour and irony, while the conventional heroes are earnest.

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