Poland’s Jewish (and Communist) Problem

In the West we tend to see the fall of communism as ushering in greater freedom for religious and other minorities. It’s true that after decades of post-war silence, Poland’s Jewish heritage industry, which includes a gleaming museum in the center of Warsaw, an annual Jewish culture festival in Krakow, and thousands of local efforts to excavate history, is flowering. But does this mean that Poland is overcoming its Jewish problem? Arlene Stein spoke to Anna Zawadzka, Polish sociologist, who examines the changing forms of antisemitism in Polish culture in a new book More than a Stereotype , cautioning us against such facile conclusions.

 

 

Arlene Stein: In the early 1990s, when I first started visiting Poland, there were few signs of the 1000-year-presence of Jews there.  It was difficult to find evidence of that once rich culture, or memorials to its destruction. This was true even in Warsaw, which before the war was the capital of Jewish Europe. Today, in contrast, there is a great deal of interest in Jewish matters. The shift is quite striking. What conclusions should we draw from this about the status of Jews, and antisemitism, in Polish society?

Anna Zawadzka: Today antisemitism is written in culture in different spaces. There are fewer people who believe that Jews run the world or the media. But that doesn’t mean that antisemitism has faded away– it takes different forms. One of the foundations of Polish antisemitism today is the obsessive need to compete for collective Polish suffering with the Jews. Poles are convinced that they were as persecuted as Jews during the war. Already in the 1990s, Poles believed that it was mainly Poles who died at Auschwitz. Of course many victims had Polish identities, but they were killed there because they were Jewish and not because they were Polish. Today, the “holocaustisation” of the Polish experience of nazism and communism is incredibly extensive. Antisemitism is also expressed in national myths about the supposedly wonderful attitude of Poles toward Jews. Many people now believe the fairy tale about pre-war Jewish-Polish brotherhood and about how the majority of Poles helped Jews during World War II.

So while there is far less silence about Jewish matters in Poland today than even a decade or two ago, that does not necessarily imply progress in confronting the legacies of Polish antisemitism. Would that be correct to say? 

Yes, silence is not an issue anymore. Now everyone is talking about Jewish life and death.  It is no longer the question ‘if’, it’s rather the question ‘how’. Among Polish elites, antisemitism is falsely diagnosed as simply a problem of the far right. The rightwing are of course part of it. But the nationalist narrative about history is the collective work of all political factions that have ruled Poland since the early 2000s. In Poland, if you want to know what is happening in the field of antisemitism, rather than watching small groups of extremists, you need to focus on the fully legitimized and very high budget historical politics. Go to the museums, watch the historical movies, see what is in the schoolbooks, follow the trail of monuments set up in Warsaw on every corner, go to the main streets of the city during national holidays such as Polish Independence Day.  

When you studied how cultural institutions discuss the “Jewish issue,” what did you find?

I found that antisemitism is not a way of thinking which comes from individuals and their pathology, their needs or frustrations. Rather, there are patterns of thinking that are already embedded in culture. They have very long history and very important functions for stabilizing Poland as a symbolic and phantasmatic entity. Instead of going after antisemites and looking for psychological reasons why they became antisemitic, we should focus on the antisemitic categories of perception that are so ingrained in our culture. Let’s try to figure out how it is produced and reproduced in society, on its different levels.

That’s why my research is not about far right or extreme political groups. While very few Poles are antisemitic in an open and conscious way, the construction of the Polish identity itself is built on antisemitic differentiation. It doesn’t have to refer openly to Jewishness to reproduce the essential distinction between non-Jews and Jews. Poland is probably the best place to understand what Jean Améry meant when he wrote that Jewish condition is not about being a Jew, it’s about not being a non-Jew.  

 How then should we think about the so-called  “Jewish revival” in Poland? Every year, for example, there is a Jewish festival in Krakow attended by thousands of people, mainly non-Jewish Poles, who gather to celebrate and learn about Jewish music and the arts. Does this new philosemitism coexist easily with what you see as a persistent and pervasive antisemitism embedded in the culture?

To understand the phenomenon of Polish philosemitism, it is necessary to understand what Jewishness looked like before this wave of “Jewish revival.” The Jews who decided to stay in Poland despite successive waves of antisemitism (1944-46, 1956, 1968) were primarily socialists and communists, secular Jews who were rooted in the traditions of Jewish leftism, usually fully assimilated, and often anti-Zionists. They had either a Polish or internationalist identity. For them, Jewishness was primarily about remembering the Shoah and their murdered loved ones, struggling against antisemitism and other forms of racism, and sometimes rooted in nostalgia. Even those Jews who after the war cherished Yiddish culture, were also mostly socialists, just from the so called Jewish Street.

In 1968, Polish communism embraced an unequivocal antisemitic nationalism. [In 1968, Jewish intellectuals and others, many of whom were thoroughly assimilated, were accused by the Communist Party of harboring Zionist loyalties, and “invited” to leave Poland]. As a result of the top-down and grassroot antisemitic campaign, some 15,000 people were expelled from Poland. This catastrophe was first followed by peculiar silence. Toward the end of the 1970s, Jewishness begins to emerge as a theme again, mainly among the young intelligentsia who are interested in new international trends including alternative forms of spirituality and other forms of counterculture. Jewishness is back, but this time as particularity, separateness, and religion. People who have experienced Polish antisemitism are finally beginning to talk about it among themselves. They are looking for a different way of dealing with these experiences than the communist universalism of their parents. Most of them are, after all, involved in anti-communist opposition. In their eyes, communism, with its universalist offer towards Jewishness, has been fully compromised. 

At the same time, American foundations sent money and people to Poland, exporting a middle class American model of Jewishness. I remember in the mid 1990s we attended a meeting where we were taught how to behave on Shabbat. My father was scolded by the host for smoking a pipe. I think it was the first time in my life that I saw him ashamed. In the West, mainly in the US, there was a growing wave of nostalgia of the next generation of Jews, the generation born after the war: let’s go look for our roots, it can’t be as terrible there as our parents said! There is a lot of fascination with the exotic in it, the different, the “wild east”. 

This “new” model of Jewishness fits into the Polish need to deal with a growing problem: what to do with inconvenient facts? In the mid-1980s, Claude Lanzmann and his film “Shoah” spectacularly reminded Poles of their participation in the Holocaust. After that, a new savior story was needed. We began to see stories about Poles welcoming  “the other,” “the stranger.” It’s a way for them to maintain a good opinion of themselves. I believe this is the root of Polish philosemitism. Poles like to go to Jewish festivals and visit the Polin Museum because it offers them a magic mirror that makes them feel like good people who are interested in cultural diversity.

One of the problems with this is that the version of Jewishness they celebrate is focused on Jewish cuisine, ritual, and religion. But the Jews who stayed in Poland after 1945 they were not those kinds of Jews. They were secular internationalists. Today’s exoticization of Jewish culture leaves out a fundamental part of the pre-war and post-war Jewish culture. The membership of Jewish people in politics before the war was tremendous. It’s really unbelievable how many political organizations – leftist, bundist, communist, socialist, Zionist, liberal, conservative, orthodox, secular, religious – there were in Jewish communities before the war. They all dealt with the issue of Polish and European antisemitism. A huge part of Jewish culture and Jewish identities was generated by the fight against antisemitism or attempts to survive it. So it’s obvious that this is not the Jewishness that Poles want to acknowledge today.

So what you’re saying is that that the growing interest in things Jewish in Poland has been accompanied by an erasure of the rich left Jewish tradition there. Is this related to the fact that a longstanding and central trope of antisemitism in Poland (and even before that, in Russia) has been that of Judeo-communism—the myth that Jews are responsible for communism?

It led, even more broadly, to an erasure of Jewish political subjectivity. An erasure of the Jewish universal claim. To understand the specificity of the function of “Jewish Bolshevism” stereotype in a post-communist country, I looked at the United States. That’s why a large part of my book is about McCarthyism. I owe a huge amount to the work of the American historians Deborah Dash Moore (“Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Symbol and substance in second generation American Jewish consciousness”) and Stewart Svonkin (Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties). They both argue that in 1950s the suspicion of ‘Bolshevism’ was a way of forcing minorities to conform to an anti-communist order and generate specific minority identities. They were forced to assimilate politically.  Dash Moore argues that the Rosenbergs were used to force American Jews to abandon leftist traditions and a radical critique of social relations. Svonkin, on the other hand, investigates how fears of being labeled Bolsheviks  led Jewish organizations to move away from a sociological diagnosis of antisemitism toward a psychological, liberal individualist one. In my opinion the same thing has been happening in Poland, mostly after 1989, and even during the socialist period. The “Jewish Bolshevik” stereotype was deployed to say: you can be here, but only as guests. Any radical claim to equality will be considered as scandalous communism. 

In the US in the 1950s and 60s, we saw many formerly leftist Jews repudiate communism in order to become more respectable and upwardly mobile. I’m referring to the so-called New York Intellectuals, and many others. Is a similar dynamic at work in Poland today?

In the 1950s it was popular in the US to publish the confessions of former communists. They described how they had been “seduced” by communism because they suffered from various emotional deficits, but eventually realized their mistake. This construction is very similar to what is required from Jews in Poland today. After 1989, anti-communism became the only possible paradigm in the former Eastern Bloc countries. Any other stance is political and social suicide. Communism was equated with Nazism and condemned as the ultimate evil. Such confessions are demanded above all from those commonly perceived as Jews. They are expected to apologize for the communism of their real or phantasmatic ancestors. Sometimes they are openly called upon to legitimize themselves in this way in the public sphere. This is a manifestation of the subordination to the dominant culture that is being forced upon the Jews in Poland. Many pass this exam. Those who refuse to do so are demonized. 

You were born in 1980, which makes you a member of the “third” post-Holocaust generation. Like most individuals with Jewish roots in Poland today, you grew up in a mixed family. Your father’s mother, who was Jewish, married a man who was a high-ranking member of the communist party, who was not Jewish. These kinds of couplings were fairly common. Did you grow up thinking of yourself as Jewish? 

Not at all. When I was 10 years old, maybe even 12, I still didn’t understand, that there are Jews and there are Poles. I didn’t get it. I was sure that everyone in Poland was Jewish. And I remember the moment I realized that I was mistaken. I was with my father. There was a newspaper on the table, in the newspaper there was a picture of a street full of people. The caption under the picture showed Varsovians in 1943, going to the cinema. I was shocked. I asked my father: How is it possible that someone could go to the cinema in 1943? I thought that everyone was hiding in basements, or forests, that no one was on the streets. How could you be on the streets in 1943? And my father said: “No, only the Jews had to hide. Poles could walk on the streets.” This was the moment I realized that there was a difference between Polish and Jewish experiences. My ignorance was a testimony to the success of the Polish historical politics and its false universalism that suggested we were all Jews. Perhaps it was also my particular blindness. I don’t know. I still don’t understand how was it possible to be so stupid. 

Who opened up the subject of Jewish roots in your family? 

Steven Spielberg! (laughing) His team at the Shoah Foundation came to Poland searching for Jews who survived, to conduct interviews. They found my family, interviewed my grandmother and my father. I still have these tapes. At the end of the interview, they invited the whole family of my father to appear together. The point was to show some presence in the Jewish life, you know, we persisted and we survived. This was the moment the subject was opened for me (laughing). I was 16, I think. I also remember that my father argued with my grandmother for a long time about whether to agree to these interviews. My father survived the Shoah as a child, he was a terrible catastrophist, all his life he waited for the next Holocaust and tried to be prepared this time. When Spielberg’s team showed up, his first instinct was that they were making lists of Jews again and if it fell into the wrong hands, we were dead. But at the same time, it must have been very tempting for him to tell his story, because in the end he agreed. I think this also initiated his growing interest in Jewishness.

If Polish Jews were once accused of engineering communism, in 1968 they were accused of quite the opposite: being more loyal to Israel than to their native Poland. It was a complete fabrication. Most Jews were deeply committed to Poland, and few thought of themselves as Zionists. I’d like you to say a little bit more about how people speak about  Zionism in Poland after October 7. 

Anti-Zionism has a very specific, local context here. It is impossible to divorce it from the events of 1968, when a fervent campaign against “Zionists” forced 15,000 Jews to leave the country. Polish Jews, who had nothing to do with Israel or Zionism, were forced to declare themselves against Israel. If they did not, they lost their jobs, they were expelled from the party, from universities, from social circles. They were summoned for interrogation. Polish society, using wide repertoire of verbal, psychological and physical violence, did the rest. While the official reason for this witchhunt was the Six-Day War, the unofficial basis for it was a growing anti-communist opposition. The state used antisemitism to crack down on the latter. The opposition are in fact Jews, they suggested. These people are disloyal to Poland, they are strangers, don’t trust them, they are loyal to Israel, which represents values that are not ours.

Unfortunately, today’s left in Poland still suffers from the Eastern European syndrome. Instead of taking the local context into account, it blindly repeats Western mantras, because what is “Western” is still seen as an object of aspiration and an authority. The result is a tragicomic situation. Let me give you an example. In 1968, the anti-Zionist campaign affected Polish universities. Jewish professors were sacked and Jewish students were expelled. A few weeks ago in Poland students on the very same campuses demanded that rectors publicly condemn Israel, break off cooperation with all Israeli institutions. In Krakow, students are calling for the Jagiellonian University to break off all cooperation with Israeli academic institutions and are also demanding that “the truth be revealed” about collaborators with Israel—as though there were dark secrets, and a conspiracy that demands investigation. They are completely unaware of the patterns of Polish culture this narrative fits into. They don’t know history. But that doesn’t mean history doesn’t speak through them.

What is it about leftists in Poland and elsewhere taking a stand against Israel that is so troubling for you? 

What I find most difficult at the moment are the ways the Western anti-Zionist left accuses Jews of colonialism and in a totally colonial act, universalizes the experience of American Jews to Jews in general. They act as if there were no other Jewish communities in the world except the one in Brooklyn! If we really want to break with the colonial imagination, we must open our eyes to the fact that for Jews in Eastern Europe or post-soviet Asia, Israel means something very different than it does for Jews in France, Belgium or Canada. I find really fascinating that they call Israel a colonial state, and at the same time somehow reproduce symbolic colonialism. As for the Polish left, if it really cared about the local context, it wouldn’t ignore 1968 and the history of Polish anti-Zionism. And you couldn’t also ignore why Israel was created. I mean, those “Zionist colonizers” were running away from Poland, which was basically organizing pogroms on every corner. 

Many progressive Jews find themselves in a difficult position today. We are horrified at the current Gaza war, and the Netanyahu government’s absolute lack of concern for human rights. At the same time, even many of us who are not Zionists see the settler colonial frame as inadequate for fully grasping the current situation.

Absolutely. I can only imagine how difficult this is to discuss it in United States. And ironically, it’s also very difficult to discuss it here. The difficulties are similar but the reasons are different. There is such great emotional investment in portraying Jews as perpetrators here. Why is it so important for Poles? Why do they find such a comfort in it? I think it’s a leftist version of a dominant historical politics of Poland, which is obsessed with a contest for victimhood. Poles want to win first place among the sufferers, but there are always Jews in the way, who are really difficult to beat. So, today, having proof that Jews are the bad guys, the perpetrators, makes Poles look different. Finally, we are not the only the perpetrators. We are not on the bad side. They are also bad. For Poles, it’s a relief. Woof! Finally!

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Interview by Arlene Stein