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Encounters with Antisemitism
Author(s): Kamusella, Tomasz
Date: 2020
Topics: Antisemitism, Memory, Oral History and Biography, Holocaust, Main Topic: Antisemitism
Abstract: The Holocaust destroyed Jewish communities across Europe and in Poland. Subsequently, in the Soviet bloc, most Jewish survivors were expelled from or coerced into leaving their countries, while the memory of the millennium-long presence of Jews in Poland was thoroughly suppressed. Through the lens of a scholar’s personal biography, this article reflects on how snippets of the Jewish past tend to linger on in the form of absent presences, despite the national and systemic norm of erasing any remembrance of Poles of the Jewish religion. This norm used to be the dominant type of antisemitism in communist Poland after 1968, and has largely continued unabated after the fall of communism.
Yiddish, or Jewish German? The Holocaust, the Goethe-Institut, and Germany’s Neglected Obligation to Peace and the Common European Cultural Heritage
Translated Title: Ідыш, або габрэйскі нямецкі?1Халакост, Інстытут імя Гётэ, і занядбанае абавязацельства Германіі да міру і агульнай эўрапейскай культурнай спадчыны
Author(s): Kamusella, Tomasz
Date: 2021
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Holocaust, Holocaust Education, Jewish Heritage, Yiddish, Universities / Higher Education
Abstract: The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe’s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany’s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.