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This book comprises interviews with some of the last surviving veterans of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw ghetto, accompanied by never previously published photographic “postcards” from a number of ghettos, and a reconstruction of the only surviving contemporary list of those soldiers. The first part of the book, “Still Circling,” is a collection of interviews with the last surviving soldiers of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The section opens with an interview recorded in 1985 with ŻOB commander Marek Edelman, and ends with another conversation with him recorded in 2000. Grupińska’s other interlocutors are als...
Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.
Bolesław Prus and the Jews shows the complexity of the so-called “Jewish question” in nineteenth-century Congress Poland and especially its significance in Prus’ social concept, reflected in his extensive body of journalistic work, fiction, and treatises. The book traces Prus’ evolving worldview toward Jews, from his support of the Assimilation Program in his early years to his eventual support of Zionism. These contrasting ideas show us the complexity of the discourse on Jewish issues from the individual perspective of a significant writer of the time, as well as the dynamics of the Jewish modernization process in a “non-existent” partitioned Poland. The portrait of Prus that emerges is surprisingly ambivalent.
Drawing from diverse multilingual sources, Krzemień delves into Solomon Dubno's life (1738–1813), unraveling complexities of the Haskalah movement's ties to Eastern European Jewish culture. Dubno, a devout Polish Jew and adept Hebrew grammarian, played a pivotal role in Moses Mendelssohn's endeavor to translate the Bible into German with a modern commentary (Biur). The book explores Dubno's library, mapping the intellectual realm of a Polish Maskil in Western Europe. It assesses his influence on Mendelssohn's project and the reasons behind their divergence. Additionally, it analyzes Dubno's poetry, designed to captivate peers with the Bible's linguistic beauty. The outcome portrays early Haskalah as a polyvocal, polycentric creation shaped by diverse, occasionally conflicting, visions, personalities, and egos.
State socialism tried to industrialize, urbanize, encourage the more frequent washing of hands, urge people to leave the church, emancipate women, and electrify cities—all within a single lifetime. Central to these initiatives was extending educational opportunities to the working class and creating a vision of an egalitarian socialist university that offered advancement for all. Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland traces the possibilities and limits of this goal by looking at a model socialist university established in 1945 in the working-class city of Łódź, Poland. Initially a flagship project of socialist modernization, the university tried to offer social advancement by privileging admission for peasant and working-class children, but these efforts were often fought by the elite who sought to preserve their privilege. By looking at first-generation students, intelligentsia faculty, and an industrial city, Limiting Privilege explores a complex story about utopian visions, failed aspirations, and reluctant academia.
This volume emerged from the conference "Polish Literature Since 1989" held at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It shows how the profound political and economic transformation that has taken place in Poland since the end of communism in 1989 has affected literary culture and literary scholarship, such as: changing conceptions of Polish nationhood and identity * the impact of European integration (since 2004) * the effects of migration * revised conceptions of the foreign or the marginal, and new understandings of what is understood by emigre or emigrant literature * sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity, as well as the impact of feminism and queer studies * the huge impact of revived interest in the Jewish heritage, in Holocaust memory, and in Polish-Jewish relations. (Series: Polonistik im Kontext - Vol. 2)
The book scrutinizes post-war rat control programs in Poland, exploring their intricate intersections with politics, science, and ideology. It delves into the impact of prevailing cultural narratives concerning problematic urban rodents on pest control and sanitary programs, as well as the ways in which biological factors shape, challenge, or impede political modernization initiatives. Employing urban rat populations as an unequivocal exemplar of an undesirable element, the author constructs an inquiry into the strategies of political exclusion. The analysis of rat extermination schemes facilitates an exploration of the patterns of social progress within a semi-peripheral country and the discursive shifts evident in political language regarding the troublesome non-human urban residents.
No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country's visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland's historic struggles for independence and anti-Communist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country's current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol - defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country's Others - and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles.
In this book, scholars with different disciplinary and national backgrounds argue for possible answers and analyse case studies on current issues of governance in biomedical research. These issues comprise among others the research-care distinction, risk evaluation in early human trials, handling of incidental findings, nocebo effects, cluster randomized trials, publication bias, or consent in biobank research. This book demonstrates how new technologies and research possibilities multiply or intensify already known governance challenges, leaving room for ethical analysis and complex moral choices. Clinical researchers, research ethics committee members and research ethicists have all to deal with such challenges on a daily basis. While general reflection on core concepts of research ethics is seldom pointless, those confronted with hard moral choices do need more practical and contextualized reflection on the said issues. This book particularly provides such contextualized reflections and aims to inform all those who study, conduct, regulate, fund, or participate in biomedical research.