Abstract: This chapter highlights how the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union initiated a new period in the history of the Jews in the area. Poland was now a fully sovereign country, and Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova also became independent states. Post-imperial Russia faced the task of creating a new form of national identity. This was to prove more difficult than in other post-imperial states since, unlike Britain and France, the tsarist empire and its successor, the Soviet Union, had not so much been the ruler of a colonial empire as an empire itself. All of these countries now embarked, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, on the difficult task of creating liberal democratic states with market economies. For the Jews of the area, the new political situation allowed both the creation and development of Jewish institutions and the fostering of Jewish cultural life in much freer conditions, but also facilitated emigration to Israel, North America, and western Europe on a much larger scale.
Abstract: This chapter describes on the Kraków Festival of Jewish Culture, founded in 1988 by Jewish intellectuals Janusz Makuch and Krzysztof Gierat. The public embrace of Jewish culture in Poland had its roots in the anti-communist dissident movements of the 1960s and 1970s and developed steadily after the success of Solidarność in 1980 opened up new cultural and intellectual freedoms that were only partially stifled by the imposition of martial law in 1981. The pervasiveness of underground networks forced some relaxation of official strictures, too. Many taboos remained in place, but from the early 1980s on, with official sanction that at times verged on co-option, books on Jewish topics were published, research on Jewish subjects was carried out, and exhibitions, concerts, and performances on Jewish themes were held with increasing frequency. The Kraków festival was a milestone in this process and throughout the 1990s served as an important, continuing catalyst, changing and developing as overall conditions in post-communist Poland evolved.
Abstract: n 2016 I published the results of three surveys, two on antisemitism and xenophobia in Poland and one on antisemitism and xenophobia in Ukraine, in Polin 29. The first of these was conducted in 1992, at the very start of Poland’s turn to democracy. The second, conducted ten years later in 2002, coincided with the end of the transition to democracy and just before Poland’s acceptance into the European Union. Shortly afterwards, in 2003, thanks to a grant from the Polish Committee of Scientific Research, we conducted a comparative study in Ukraine.¹
I now present the conclusions of a fourth survey, conducted in Poland a decade later in 2012 and representing a time when democracy was supposedly being consolidated.2 This survey reveals some optimistic changes in Poles' behaviour and attitudes towards Jews and 'Others' in general. It shows, however, some very disturbing features. These would be felt some years later when the right-wing, nationalist-Catholic Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS) won the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2015. This new material adds to the picture that emerged from the previous surveys, but other features are evident as well. We were unable to repeat the survey in Ukraine because of the outbreak of social protest and the occupation of Maidan in Kiev in 2013.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy performance and “Jewfaçade” display in three contemporary contexts with highly divergent historical backgrounds: East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a fictitious-sounding but real colony established by Stalin in far eastern Russia near China and still extant today. Jewface encompasses music, dance, theater, and extra-theatrical modes of performance, in which non-Jews dress up and act like “Jews,” as historically imagined; Jewfaçade encompasses museum-type installations, as well as architectural and decorative constructions, depicting imagined “Jewish” life. These “Diaspora Disneys” vary from the education- and tolerance-oriented to the crassly exploitative and commercial to the bizarrely confused. None have much to do with actual Jews, but all convey a tremendous amount regarding dominant “host” cultures’ anxieties over not only their roles in past persecution and genocide but also their own present cultures, politics, and positions in the wider world today. Further, they present a wide array of models of memoriological projection and desire, in what I explicate as spectra of “plethoric” to “voidic” memoriological scenarios and “negotiatory” to “constitutory” memoriological strategies.
Abstract: A “Jew-themed” restaurant provides its patrons with broad-brimmed black hats with foot-long sidecurls to wear, and the menu has no prices; patrons must bargain, or “Jew,” the staff down. A play billed as a tribute to a lost Jewish community ends in a gag: Death throws back his shroud to reveal an open-brain-pate wig, à la the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street. In a “traditional Jewish wedding dance,” “Jewish wealth” is represented by a local luxury: vacuum-packed juice boxes. In parts of the world where Jews, once populous, have nearly vanished because of oppression, forced exile, and genocide, non-Jews now strive to re-enact what has been lost. In this essay, I will consider three general cases of what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy and
“Jewfaçade” display, in Krakow, Poland; the village of Hervás in western Spain; and Birobidzhan, capital city of Russia’s far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Region, which is known as Birobidzhan as well. Jewface-resembling the “blackface” prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-is the practice of music, dance, theatre, and/or extra-theatrical types of performance, primarily by non-Jews, intended to convey notions of historical Jewish life and culture. Jewfaçade involves architectural and decorative constructions, again mainly by nonJews, meant to evoke ideas of the Jew in similar ways. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the team of Daniela Flesler and Adrian Pérez Melgosa, and other journalists and scholars have documented what Michael Brenner has called “Jewish culture without Jews” in Poland and Spain, as well as elsewhere in Europe (Brenner 1997: 152). However, no comparative study has been made, and no scholar has approached this topic with regard to Birobidzhan. I will provide brief overviews of Jewface and Jewfaçade activities in Krakow, Hervás, and Birobidzhan. I will then demonstrate the ways in which the notions of the figure of the Jew and of local Jewish history are performed, or acted out in these three comparative geographical contexts. These cases, as, in conclusion, I will argue, represent three very different approaches to public memory and memorialization with regard to the Jew, and perhaps in regard to troubled historical legacies more generally.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites.
The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.
Abstract: The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern European history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the European Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as Germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and European history.
Abstract: This research contributes to the understanding of the process of reconstructing the memory of Jews in contemporary Poland. Focusing on a case study of a town in southern Poland, Mszana Dolna, the study analyses how Jewish/non-Jewish relations and the history of the Jews of the town are remembered by the current inhabitants of Mszana, as well as by Holocaust survivors and their families. The research is based on an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of memory, using in depth oral history interviews, archival and other written materials, as well as participant observation as sources of analysed data. The study concentrates on the memory of the life in Mszana before, during and after the war in terms of the coexistence of two communities, Jewish and non-Jewish ones. Focusing mainly on the annual commemoration of the shooting of the Jews of Mszana in August 1942 by non-Jewish members of the community and their participation in the educational programmes, the research elucidates the process of regaining the Jewish heritage of the town by non-Jewish inhabitants and incorporating it into the past of the community of Mszana. Identifying the variety of levels of interactions between Jews and non-Jews before the war, it argues that the interrupted coexistence of both groups in Mszana resulted in the void which remained after the destroyed Jewish community. The memory of Jews found its place in the oral history for several decades. Through examining the forms of remembrance of the Jews in Mszana, this study attempts to illustrate the transition of the memory of Jews from private sphere of life to the public discourse on the Jewish inheritance of the town.
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.
The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).
The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.
Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.
Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.
Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.
Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.
Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.
Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.
The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
