Abstract: This dissertation illustrates how a moral burden of history manifests itself in social relationships, cultural processes, and material products. Specifically, it argues that what appears to many as a superficial, commercially motivated revival of Jewishness in Poland is also a significant joint venture between non-Jewish Poles and Jewish visitors to Poland in exploring inter-ethnic memory-building and reconciliation. The findings are based on 18 months of ethnographic research in the historical Jewish quarter (Kazimierz) in Krakow, Poland, with further research in Israel and the United States among diaspora Jews. My research reveals that the notion of uniform Holocaust tourism disguises a movement to contest lachrymose conceptions of Jewishness as victimhood. I document a sense of Jewish connection to Poland---overlooked in mainstream discourses---that animates new generations of Jews and Poles to seek each other out. Similarly, much of the Jewish revival in Kazimierz is orchestrated by non-Jewish Poles. I show how they use identification with Jewishness to reconfigure their own Polishness and their visions for a pluralistic Polish nation state. I conclude that (1) popular cultural products, practices, and spaces can be important manifestations of---and tools for---moral reckoning; (2) identification with someone else's ethnicity/religion (often called appropriation) can be understood as an enlargement of, rather than an escape from, the self, and (3) Kazimierz in Krakow represents the cutting edge of Polish-Jewish relations via local grassroots culture brokers who use Jewishness to expand the Polish universe of obligation.
Abstract: In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.
Abstract: In recent years, Jews, Germans, and Poles have stood at three corners of a triangle, labeled, respectively, as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders by genocide researchers treating the Holocaust. The formulation advanced previous equations, where scholars could only imagine the duality of victim-perpetrator.3 Newrevelations about kinds and layers of complicity, competing claims to victim-hood, and the recognition that individuals may inhabit more than one of the categories, force us to confront the complexity of interrelations. Yet, the rise of attention to public memory in Holocaust studies suggests, rather than a permanent two-dimensional geometry, a different idiom: an active, jockeying troika of nations, yoked together by a difficult history. This new metaphor allows us to anticipate and attend to the ongoing tensions and shifts that occur among members of the team, on whom different memorial burdens may be placed. In this chapter, I address the circumstances of a major, and quite recent, transmogrification of the symbolic Jews-Germans-Poles constellation. Namely, I argue that in the framework of Jewish Holocaust tourism to Poland, Nazi Germany (i.e., the perpetrator) disappears. In its place, Poland has emerged as much more satisfying object of opprobrium, even as—and indeed, I will argue, because—Poland is also beginning to be excavated as a site of more general relevance in Jewish memory-culture.
Abstract: Based on preliminary research, we ask what insights can be gleaned about Polish Holocaust memory and testimony by examining the prolific art made by Polish ‘folk’ artists, via a range of disciplinary approaches. What can art history, visual culture studies, oral history, anthropology, memory studies, and museum studies tell us about the motivations, functions, and ethical implications of such works? Can they be considered acts of witness? Broadly, our text considers the status of ‘art naïve’ in the contexts of Holocaust representation, ethnographic museology, and bystander testimony.
