Abstract: The authors of this text, two Israeli historians, probe the background to the keynote speech delivered by Thomas Rose, the US ambassador to Poland, at the conference of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Judges in Warsaw in November 2025. The newly appointed envoy—a Republican political appointee and former publisher of The Jerusalem Post—insisted that claims of any Polish complicity in the German annihilation of Polish Jewry amount to a “blood libel.” In Contrast, Dreifuss and Weinbaum contend that these remarks serve to reinforce ongoing efforts by individuals and Polish officialdom to delegitimize the rigorous scholarship of a determined band of Polish researchers who have been studying wartime Polish–Jewish relations for nearly three decades. While condemning the occasional conflation of Poles with the actual masterminds and prime perpetrators of the Final Solution, the authors emphasize that local participation in the degradation, dispossession, and destruction of Polish Jews was far more extensive than had been previously recognized. They further argue that both Communist and post-Communist governments, as well as Polish individuals and institutions at home and in exile, have resisted confronting these findings and that scholars and others who challenge more reassuring narratives have faced sustained and often vitriolic attacks. The authors conclude that this excruciating chapter of history must be confronted dispassionately—on the basis of meticulous scholarly inquiry—and should not be subordinated to diplomatic or political agendas.
