1. Art representing Roma, gays and Jews has been banned and destroyed in Lublin, Poland, twice host to Transeuropa Festival. Stop Toleration for Toleration, a far-right soccer hooligan march, with hate speech chants, has lashed back against the social-artistic campaign Lublin for All, led by Szymon Pietrasiewicz. The campaign included bus tickets with the images of national and sexual minorities who have shaped this city for centuries as a hub of Jewish, Romany, Protestant and queer cultures. City Hall, under pressure from the soccer hooligans, censored and shredded this art. As the municipal authorities have caved in to the extreme right, Lublin — it appears — is not welcoming at all.

The destruction of art crushes the human geography of Lublin: this is a blow to the heritage of this intercultural city and to the current art activism working to make Lublin hospitable.

We need to reclaim Lublin from the far-right soccer hooligans. That’s why the ground breaking Holocaust scholars Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton, Poland’s leading feminist Kazimiera Szczuka, and this country’s only out gay MP Robert Biedron have all signed an open letter “Let’s not give Lublin up to intolerance, aggression and social exclusion,” authored by Agnieszka Zietek, a political activist and lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.

2. “Lublin free of fags!” “Run Pietrasiewicz out of Lublin!” “F … Gazeta Wyborcza [Poland’s progressive newspaper]!” “A boy and a girl are a normal family!” “Lublin, a city without deviations!” These were the chants of the soccer hooligan marchers. As editor-in-chief of the local branch of the Gazeta Wyborcza broadsheet Malgorzata Bielecka-Holda writes, the catcalls were received with sympathy by City Hall. This is just one element of the rise of the far right in Lublin. Other ominous developments: the mobilization of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the hosting of these Brown Shirts by the local Solidarność trade union, evictions and layoffs of the underprivileged, the predicament of refugees and women, refusing abortion to the fourteen-year-old rape victim Agata, and attacks on those who are reviving Jewish life.

3. Activist for Jewish Lublin, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, 57, has been assaulted with swastikas sprayed on his flat and with an explosive device. In 1990, he established Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre, devoted to the commemoration of Jewish culture in Lublin through plays, exhibitions, a publishing house and workshops for high-school students. Pietrasiewicz was also attacked with anti-Semitic posters that were pasted in his block of flats and in bus stops throughout Lublin. The perpetrators have not been found. As Pawel P. Reszka reported in Gazeta Wyborcza, the National Radical Camp (ONR), at a press conference hosted by Solidarność, insinuated that Pietrasiewicz attacked himself.

4. In 2006 Tomasz’s son, Szymon founded Tektura Space for Creative Activities, a squat with concerts, exhibitions and campaigns for human rights, women, LGBT, the homeless and seniors. This alternative collective opposes consumerism and neo-Nazism. Tektura is often threatened by skinhead raids, but, significantly, it is also not respected by economic neoliberals because of its stance for fair trade, the redistribution of goods and social justice, countering Poland’s widespread belief in the infallibility of the free market.

5. This year Szymon Pietrasiewicz started the Studio for Socially Engaged Art Rewiry, responsible for the campaign Lublin for All. The Rewiry has worked intensively in the deprived areas of Lublin, involving their residents in art activism. Pietrasiewicz’s Studio has also invited such artists as Joanna Rajkowska and Rafal Betlejemski to work with the local residents. The Rewiry is planning to bring the representatives of the international scene like David Cerny as well as Svajone and Paulius Stanikas to Lublin, too.

6. Tomasz Pietrasiewicz was a dissident in the 1980s, active in alternative theatre and underground publishing. Now two generations of nonconformists run the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and Tektura that champion independent culture. NN and Tektura hosted Transeuropa Festival which foregrounded LGBT, intercultural Lublin and refugees.

7. Chechen asylum seekers have told us at Transeuropa Lublin that they don’t feel that they’re treated as human beings here. A country of traditional emigration, Poland doesn’t welcome refugees. In October 2012 over 70 refugees in detention centers throughout Poland held a hunger strike against the legal and material conditions to which they had been condemned. A woman journalist from Georgia, Ekaterina Lemondzawa, wrote a dramatic letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, in which she described the humiliations that she had been subjected to as a refugee in Poland. The broadsheet later reported: “Poland is allegedly the only country in the European Union, where refugees, including children, being held for months in detention centers, are called from their rooms by whistle to stand at attention.” Helsinki Human Rights Foundation representative Karolina Rusilowicz confirms that “these detention centers hold a penitentiary regime.”

At Transeuropa Festival, Chechen refugees shared their problems — in fact hardships — with us. Generally, asylum-seeking should be decriminalized and immigration facilitated in the European Union. Migrants and refugees must not be treated as criminals. The Seyla Benhabib-inspired Lublin political scientist Sylwia Nadgrodkiewicz writes that one needs to go beyond the logic of exclusion in order to make immigration easier.

8. International experts, in a report on Lublin as an intercultural city, indicated that refugees should be more visible in this city. Szymon Pietrasiewicz’s campaign Lublin for All attempts to present Lublin’s coexistence of different cultures and the need for acceptance and cooperation; these images embody the ethics and aesthetics of diversity and equality. The censorship, ban and destruction of the bus tickets hurt the cause for an open Lublin.

9. The art expert and political economist Mikolaj Iwanski writes ironically: “Lublin’s leadership have begun a race to see who can condemn the action [Lublin for All] faster … It turns out that a smiling black man shouting Motor [the name of the club] is a deadly threat to the city, to this second-league club and to the municipal transportation.” On a serious note, Iwanski adds that “anti-Semitism, homophobia and ethnic prejudices are still present in Polish stadiums.” The Lublin area is very poor. Amidst economic hardships, scapegoating, conspiracy theories and prejudices are rampant.

10. Submitting to the far right could not be more dangerous here. That is why an MP Michal Kabacinski, 24, protested against Lublin City Hall’s submission to the soccer hooligans. “The mayor has failed to respond to these events. This was show of hate speech, a presentation of anti-Semitic and xenophobic positions. A scandal. We must not accept these events.” On the door of Lublin city hall Kabacinski hung a picture of the mayor next to a portrait of Adolf Hitler and an image of the Ku Klux Klan. The MP explained how he had intended to demonstrate that City Hall agrees with the promotion of ideologies which these figures represent.

11. Lublin has been a city of women, minorities and migrants. Let us remember the residents of Lublin: Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Scots. Nowadays we must encourage contemporary migrants, including economic ones. Lubliners have enjoyed hospitality abroad, and metaphysically we are all migrants to this world. We must not allow prejudices in our region — that is why social change is badly needed. Let’s find within ourselves more than toleration: acceptance, more than integration: recognizing otherness as value, more than dialogue: cooperation among cultures. Zygmunt Bauman recently spoke about such a collaboration at both the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

I have no doubt that the works of Jan Gross, and the writing of many Polish journalists, historians and sociologists, contribute to the foundation of democracy in Poland.  They advance the project of freedom for Poles and for other nations, to echo the famous slogan of Polish patriots of the 19^th Century.  They address the Jewish question; for me, they address my mother’s question, with their dignity.  There has been an extended debate, an official apology by the President of Poland and an official inquiry and correction of the public record.  All of this has been noted and admired abroad, even as it sparks controversy.

On the other hand, there was much that was said and written in response to the revelations about Jedwabne, that brought me back to my Polish American compatriot’s “Jew down” remark, as reported in my first “Why Poland?” post, and much worse.  It has been very hard for me to read the primitive, but also the more refined, anti-Semitism, which is now very much a part of Polish public discourse.  I realize now that my travels in Poland back in the seventies, and my intensive work with the democratic opposition and underground Solidarność, though extensive and long enduring, were in important ways limited.  I knew how Jews and anti-Semitism were symbolically central to modern Polish identity, but I thought there had been a significant collective learning process that had put its more pernicious aspects into the past.  Now, I am not as sure of this as I once was.  Apparently there were broad segments of popular opinion that I did not perceive.

I wonder now whether I really understood the nature of the problem then, whether I really understand it now.  Did I really confront Polish complicity in the Holocaust?  Clearly, I didn’t.  Only after reading Gross do I begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.  Did I really understand the meaning of the Kielce pogrom?  Perhaps I did, but it is so much clearer after reading Gross’s latest book, Fear. I suspect that my learning was not that different than that of many of you in this audience, although we may have started from a different place.

I have not been easy on Poles, or Europeans in general, when it comes to anti-Semitism.  I have had few illusions about my European roots.  I, as a Jew, represent the other in the European tradition: vilified through the dominant interpretation of Christian doctrine, at least until Vatican II, and the subject of folk beliefs that are horrific, fantastical and ominous. And it was not just a matter of simple folk who knew no better, great works of European literature as well are saturated with anti Semitic assertions and allusions. I understand that some pretty articulate anti-Semites opposed genocide, some openly, some secretly.  I know that there is a significant distance between the traditional anti-Semite and the genocidal killer, but I understand, as well, that the former in some way is a precondition for the latter.  I am not sure how much different Polish Christians were from other Europeans.  But that does not absolve either group.  I understand the wisdom of my grandparents’ flight from Europe.  I owe my life to it.

But apart from such melodramatic reflection and accusation, how do we, Poles and Jews, get beyond this?  I think I saw people of good will trying to do so in 1995, as they commemorated the memory of the liberation of Auschwitz.  But, finally, they failed.  There were obvious problems, which have become clearer in the debates over Jedwabne, and in revelations and accusations about Kielce.

I must start with the most obvious, something I have been guilty of until this point in my presentation: the very idea of Poles and Jews.  The language makes sense, Polish memory as distinct from Jewish memory.  I think the greatest contribution of Gross is to show how this common sense and usage, which implies that there is a distinct separation between the Polish Jewish and the Polish Catholic experience, is not only ethically problematic but also historically misleading.  Polish Catholics and Polish Jews cannot really understand their pasts without confronting their very mixed up connections.  Thus it is highly problematic that there were separate ceremonies at the Auschwitz memorials in 1995.

I find this all so depressing. My years as a Poland watcher taught me to expect more, although my recognition of the wisdom of my mother’s “Why Poland?” question should have prepared me.  Permit me to reflect back and forth between what gives me hope to what disgusts, from what angers to what puzzles, to what gives me hope again.

The official ceremony honoring the victims of the Jedwabne atrocity, unlike the commemoration of Auschwitz, was a noble affair.  Every effort was made to do the right thing, to correct the official record, to honor the victims and the righteous.  Not everyone supported the memorial.  Some notably chose not to be there, but those at the event made significant progress in transcending the problem of Polish versus Jewish memory.

As I was preparing this presentation, I spoke to an Israeli sociologist, Natan Sznaider, who happened to be at the event.  His father in law was the Israeli Ambassador to Poland at the time.  He remembers the grace of President Kwasniewski in his impeccable address:

We know with certainty that among the persecutors and perpetrators there were Poles.  We cannot have any doubt that here in Jedwabne, citizens of the Polish Republic perished at the hands of other citizens of the Republic.  People prepared this fate for people, neighbors for neighbors…We express our pain and shame; we give expression of our determination in seeking to learn the truth, our courage in overcoming an evil past, our unbending understanding and harmony.  Because of this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness.  Therefore, today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize.  I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.  In the name of those who believe that we cannot be proud of the magnificence of Polish history without at the same time feeling pain and shame for the wrongs that Poles have done to others.

But as you know, better than I do, this was only one response to the Jedwabne revelations.

I read an interview with Cardinal Glemp by the Catholic News Agency (KAI). It astonished me, dripping with anti-Semitism.  He is so unreflective about this, like my Polish American colleague so many years ago, that I doubt he even realizes it, as she didn’t.  Polish Jewish conflicts in the thirties had no religious basis, according to the Cardinal.  Asked if he thought that Jews experienced a rise in attacks during Holy Week because of accusations of God-killing, he expresses astonishment.  “This statement strikes me as improbable.  The first time I ever heard of this rise in anti-Jewish feeling was in Mr. Gross’s book.  Clearly the book was written ‘on commission’ for someone.”

What could he be referring to?  Is Gross in the pay of the Zionists, or the international Jewish conspiracy, or is it the Jewish lobby, or perhaps even “The Elders of Zion?”  Near Churches, it has been reported, literature about all of this has become available in democratic Poland. A radio station makes its niche on the listening dial with this kind of stuff.  The Cardinal goes on: “Polish-Jewish conflicts did occur in those times, but they had an economic basis.  Jews were cleverer, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.”  In American English: they could “Jew them down,” I guess.   He does qualify this point. I think realizing that it was not quite politically correct, adding: “In any case, that was the perception.”  Why was the church commemorating the atrocities on May 27^th and not July 10^th?  The 10th was not convenient.  The major lesson of Gross’s inquiry is lost on Glemp.  He and many others were not open to learning.  Arguing for the exhumation of the site of the atrocities, contrary to a request by Jews to honor religious law and refrain from desecrating the graves, he defends his position by asserting “Jewish law is not binding in Poland.” As if that were the issue, not realizing that it is a matter of honoring and respecting customs other than your own, so that you may honor and respect people who you don’t consider to be of your own.  Poles versus Jews, yet again.  He wants to do this “because it is important to know the number of victims.”

I know that this is an issue that Glemp and many respected Polish academics and scholars think is central.  As a matter of principle, I am in favor of trying to understand the truth in the details. I’ve dedicated my life to this.  It is a major theme of my recent work on “the politics of small things”.  But that the number of victims is an issue, with great moral and political importance, escapes me.  Does it change the moral challenge if “only” 400 people, “Jews,” were brutally murdered by their neighbors, “Poles,” instead of 1600?  Glemp goes on and on, wondering why Jews slander Poland, “when Jews had it relatively the best with us, here in Poland.” And further: “We wonder whether Jews should not acknowledge that they have a burden of responsibility in regard to Poles, in particular for the period of close cooperation with the Bolsheviks, for complicity in deportations to Siberia, for sending Poles to jails, for the degradation of many of their fellow citizens, etc.”  In his reflections on Jewish cleverness, there are the Jewish banker and lawyer, the capitalists.  In his reflections on the Soviet occupation, there are the Jewish communists.

The leader of the Church in Poland does not stand alone, clearly.  In the Church there are strong and articulate alternative voices, I know.  I read a moving piece by Rev. Stanislaw Musial just after I read the Glemp interview.

But in the reaction to the Jedwabne revelations, there is also much that is worse than is revealed in the Cardinal’s interview, with vile and more aggressive anti-Semitism.  And, it seems to me, these are given support by the manifestly less pernicious and refined refusal to face the legacies of the past.  They open a space for refined and vulgar anti-Semitism. There are those who worry about the numbers, who think the evidence of the murder is still not in. There are those who ask “Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?” And there are those who question Gross’s approach to survivors’ testimony: i.e. take them to be truthful unless proven otherwise.

Gross wisely makes this recommendation because of the profound and systematic ignorance of Polish complicity in the murder of their Jewish compatriots when the more normal alternative skeptical approach prevails.  He is suggesting a way of restructuring historical practice so that it encourages a systematic examination of dark corners in the national past, instead of systematically ignoring them.  Prominent historians defend their professional ethics and accomplishments.  Gross and his supporters question how it is possible that they have for so long overlooked the anti-Semitic atrocities both during and after the war.

I find myself engaging the debates, moved and heartened by some contributions, dismayed by others.  Reading anxiously Gross’s next book, Fear, I realize how radical is his challenge and am convinced by his careful analysis of the post war pogroms and individual murders of Jewish survivors after Auschwitz.  Some of his explanation for how this happened I find persuasive: the legacies of totalitarianism and the continuities between Nazi and Communist practices, the brutalization of the population, the normalization of stealing from and the murder of Jews that was part of the landscape during the Nazi occupation and for some time afterward.  I am not convinced by his arguments completely.  The projection argument, his thesis that Poles couldn’t face the survivors because of their own complicity, I am not sure about.

I have read others who make a significant contribution to my understanding of my mother’s Polish question, the Polish Jewish question, and their relationships.  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Jedlicki, Hanna Swida–Ziemba, Jerzy Slawomir Mac, Marta Kurkowska Budzan, among others. The depth and seriousness of their reflections on the cruel facts of Jedwabne mark a noble confrontation with the past.

In light of all of this, the noble and the base, I am deeply ambivalent.  Let me be honest, the ascendance of anti-Semitism in Poland after the fall of Communism has been a great disappointment to me, revealing the limits of what I called at the beginning of this presentation “the wisdom of youth.”  If I had kept in mind the experiences of my grandparents and parents a little bit more, I may have been less surprised, less disappointed.  But on the other hand, the seriousness of the Polish debate about the legacies of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I know, is very impressive.  A Polish president distinguished himself and honored the memory of my ancestors in a way that would have astonished my grandfather who had very bitter memories as a soldier in a Polish army unit in the First World War.  I am not sure that this would happen today, that the present Polish president would have so astonished my grandfather, but it did happen.  The debate in Poland has negative voices, but very importantly they are being confronted.  In sum, the three parts of this presentation add up to democratic or at least liberal progress.  There is more free discussion and open debate, and Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, and the international Jewish community benefit, as the weaknesses of the demos are revealed.

Yet, I must conclude with a note of concern.  As I have been writing and rewriting this lecture, I have wondered how you will receive my observations.  I wonder whether I have breached the boundaries of the politically correct or polite.  I made some of my observations with some reluctance.  Are my critical comments unnecessarily provocative, or are they just obvious?  Did I go too far, or not far enough?  Should I have expressed my concerns about the Church authority as bluntly and personally as I did?  I have thought about these questions not because I am afraid to reveal to you what I take to be the truth, but because I am well aware that in dealing with difficult problems with the other, the embodiment of discourse is important.  It is not just about words, but who says them, when and where.  I thus deeply appreciate Kwasniewski’s words.  It really depends who says what to whom.

In this light, I understand that I have an obligation here to express my appreciation of the great and often heroic efforts of my Polish friends and colleagues, some with Catholic background, some with Jewish background, some with both, in addressing the continuing problems of anti-Semitism in Polish political culture.  And I express my criticism of the limits of the address with reluctance.  But I must go a bit further, having to do with the limits of democracy in the appraisal of these events by many of the most sympathetic observers.

They advise that the most rabid anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon.  I want to believe them, but I am struck how it keeps on coming up, and how significant cultural and religious authorities, and political leaders, some with ascendant power, keep on using anti-Semitism, including members of today’s governing coalition. (Remember this lecture was given in 2007. This is no longer the case) It is so central that it persists for decades even with the absence of Jews and even with open democratic discussion about that embarrassing fact.  I think this is at the center of the most provocative of Jan Gross’s contributions to the consideration of Polish-Jewish relationships in Jedwabne.

Toward the end of his book, reflecting on the two memorials then in Jedwabne, he notes that one propagates the lie that the Nazis killed the 1600 Jews of the town. The other reads “‘To the memory of about 180 people including 2 priests who were murdered in the territory of the Jedwabne district in the years 1939-1956 by the NKVD, by the Nazis and the secret police [UB].’ Signed ‘Society’ [spoleczenstwo].”   He observes that Jews were killed not by Nazis, Soviets, or Polish Stalinists, but by that same “society.”   And the number 180, apparently does not count Jews as people.   The controversy has been about his blaming of society, apparently the accusation of collective guilt.  Yet, it is clear that the first memorial was a political lie, and that the second reveals a deeply problematic common sense definition of humanity.

Objecting to collective guilt has been an important part of my answer to my mother’s question.  But I think that Gross is onto something beyond such accusation.  Anti-Semitism is not in the mother’s milk of Poles (this is a vulgar, an obscene accusation) but it is in a kind of cultural code of Polish society.  Those who are critically appraising the role of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust, and also after the fall of the Communist regime, are making significant contributions to transforming the code.  Those who deny the strong tradition of Polish anti-Semitism and its tragic consequences, or approach historical and sociological questions doubting its significance, are helping to reproduce the code.  Speaking as if Poles and Jews are mutually exclusive categories, thinking about Polish and Jewish history as being apart, nurturing collective memory as distinct, bracketing my mother’s question while studying the development of the democratic opposition (my little contribution), all help to reproduce the code.

Two components of democratization of the Polish Jewish question must confront each other.  The post communist inclusion of anti-Semitism into Polish political life, as the conviction of a portion of the population, must be subjected to open and forceful democratic critique and democratic persuasion, with an honest appreciation of the dimensions of the appeal of anti-Semitism.  The outcome is not a foregone conclusion.  The positive result would mean that the symbol of the Jew would come to be less important in Polish political culture, and anti-Semitism won’t be continually reproduced.  I sincerely hope that some day it will be possible, indeed normal, to be a Polish patriot or a Polish liberal without using the symbol of the Jew.  The pious patriotic Catholic would enact patriotism and religiosity without reference to Jews.  And Polish liberals also would be able to reveal their positions on all other issues without Jews somehow playing a central symbolic role in constituting their identity.

I enjoy reading Adam Michnik on such things.  He moves the Polish audience away from the clear categories, as he challenges the Jewish audience abroad.  His mixed up identity, self identified as a Pole primarily, Jewish secondarily, identified by others, not so gallantly, as a Jew, lends a special quality to his observations on the debate.  In the U.S., he had a notable exchange with Leon Wieseltier, the book review editor of The New Republic. I was very much in Adam’s corner, but there was something to Wieseltier’s critical thrust.  There is something overly exquisite about the opening of the debate about Jedwabne in the elite media of your country and mine.  History is corrected.  Public discourse is enriched and is much wiser.  But something is missing.

As Karolina Smagalska has observed, common sense, in the understanding of Clifford Geertz, for far too many people, has not been subverted – that anti Semitic common sense that has a long and deep tradition in Poland and in Europe. Somehow the democratic public discussion has not undermined the anti-Semitic common sense, the cultural code that could either act on its own, or be incited by the Nazis in Jedwabne, that was manipulated by the Communist party or was the work of indigenous Kielce locals.  The communist period helped fortify this common sense with its cynical use of anti-Semitic sentiment, and its ideological ignorance of the Holocaust.  It is the common sense of every day practices that has deep and enduring effects.  It comes in relatively benign forms.  One can “Jew down” people after all without being directly implicated in the Holocaust.  But if you do “Jew people down” in your daily life, if you are without awareness that Jews perhaps didn’t have it so great here, you cannot yourself be free, let alone understand history and constitute a collective memory that supports democracy and decency.

Now my final words, concerning my continuing project of answering my mother’s question.  I confirm the truth of what I had assumed as a young man.  Simplistic unitary characterizations of a people or a culture are not acceptable. Human groupings are too heterogeneous.  And in the case of Poland, the heterogeneity is not just accidental.  Along with the tragic history of my people on these grounds, there are broad humane currents in the culture, recently epitomized by the work of Jan Gross and the many people who have informed his work and have been informed by it, and those who add insights beyond it.  The fresh attempts to address the problem is what I choose to focus on, the work of honorable Poles seeking alternatives in the details of their interactions, what I now call the politics of small things.  And so focused, I recognize that the alternative project is incomplete.

This is my third “Why Poland?” post. In the first, I addressed the question as it was posed by my mother most directly. I reflected upon my experience as a Jew in communist Poland in the seventies, as I observed the official anti-Semitism and the official silence about the experience of my ancestors in that land. In the second post, I consider how that silence made it difficult for people, Poles and Jews, of good will to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and how they somehow managed to join together, even as their collective memories in significant ways did not overlap. Here, I report and reflect on a debate in Poland which confronted the gaps in collective memory, a debate stimulated by the publication of a book, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, which tells the story of Polish Catholics killing Polish Jews, their neighbors, in the small town of Jedwabne during the war.

The book sparked a ferocious debate in Poland: denounced by extreme nationalists, but also the leader of the Polish Catholic Church, Cardinal Glemp, and many scholars and public figures. On the other hand, the book had many appreciative readers including citizens,officials, scholars, intellectuals and Church leaders. My report on the debate speaks for itself. My conclusion is that the debate has been difficult, but indicates that at long last there is responsible collective memory about the Shoah in Poland, which is a very positive sign, even as it reveals very negative attitudes and beliefs.

The first two parts of my “Why Poland?” reflections were written in the mid nineties, soon after the Auschwitz ceremony. This last part was added as I presented my thoughts to an audience in Lublin in 2007. I post here my address, with a few minor edits, that I presented in Lublin.

I worried about the reaction of my audience to the very critical things I had to say. I wondered if I would be taken to be too critical of the church or of Poland, or too soft. I struggled to get my tone exactly right, wanting to advance discussion not silence it. What surprised me was the relative calm of the response. I was asked one or two interesting questions, notes of appreciation were offered, but the talk did not generate much heat. I was particularly surprised and concerned that for the young people in the audience the talk seemed not to be of any special concern. It was almost as if I were talking to a group of German young people who have been through intensive instruction about the Holocaust for sixty years. But the Poles, like others in post- Communist  Europe haven’t had such instruction. Thus, I do have a concern that there is a kind of premature Holocaust fatigue, enabling  the rise of a rabid anti-Semitism, as can be observed in Hungary today.

To read “Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue,” click here.

Monday morning, I took a bit of a break from my plan for the day. I decided my class preparation and work on some overdue papers would wait. After I replied to Corey Robin’s response to a critical passing comment I made about his book, The Reactionary Mind, on Facebook, I put off until later in the week my search for interesting conservative intellectuals. I decided to ignore the Republican madness, and not worry about the ups and downs in the upcoming Presidential race, and didn’t read the reports on the Super Bowl (the annual sports media event that I usually ignore but did tweak my interest this year, New Yorker that I am). Instead, I opened my computer and watched the video of the Flying Seminar meeting with Bill Zimmerman (which I missed because I was at that time at a conference in Sofia). It was a particularly interesting meeting, very nicely captured in the video (thank you Lisa Lipscomb). I entered a different world, beyond the mundane, considering the connection between radical hopes and practical projects.

This is what the Flying Seminar is. Recall, Elzbieta Matynia and I developed the Flying Seminar in response to Occupy Wall Street. OWS reminded us of our days observing and participating in the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement in Poland, and the great independent academic project of Solidarity times, the Flying University of the Polish underground. We started with a meeting with activists in Shiroto no Ran (Amateur Revolt), a counter-cultural anti- nuclear movement which came to take part in the occupation of Zuccotti Park. We then arranged a meeting with Adam Michnik, the outstanding Polish critical intellectual and political activist, who also visited the Park. Our third meeting was with Zimmerman, an old New Leftist (it takes one to know one), author of the recent book, Troublemaker: A Memoir From the Front Lines of the Sixties. Last month, after a technical delay, we posted the video recording of that meeting.

The seminar discussion got me thinking about a crucial problem: the relationship between challenging social movements and the broader public. This issue is most apparent in the Arab uprisings, in Moscow, Bucharest and in Warsaw in democratic movements, and in New York and beyond in OWS and related occupations. We have been reflecting upon these developments in each of these locations at Deliberately Considered, but there is a general problem common to all of them, which was discussed at the Flying Seminar. The starting point in the discussion with Zimmerman was the anti-war movement in the sixties.

Zimmerman and the seminar participants covered many areas. He reflected on the problem of a radical anti-war movement, too distant from the judgments of the general population to lead a popular movement against the war. They discussed election initiatives, legalizing marijuana, prison reform, the racist quality of the war on drugs, the need to treat drug abusers rather than arrest them, and the protests against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Zimmerman explained a variety of different innovative strategies he has used to reach the public, to make his radical commitments consequential. The use of the ballot initiative and the production of anti-war and anti-Bush and Company T.V. ads, made for moveon.org, were particularly interesting.

Zimmerman discussed a series of innovative victories in his long political struggle. “I have been struggling against capitalism for fifty years.” He celebrated the Internet, the only limit to reaching the public now is our imagination, he asserted. He was thinking particularly about the costs of emailing versus the cost of postage. He recalled throwing $100 bills on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange back in the day. Wall Street was then and is now both the symbol of the problem and site of the problem itself. His was an earlier innovative dramaturgic act in the belly of the beast, meant to show radical criticism to a mass audience. Zimmerman applauded OWS for its major discursive success. “It has stimulated a broad public to fundamentally question capitalism.”

There were differences of judgment at the meeting. All knew that connecting with the public is important, but there were different opinions about how this could be achieved. Some saw a global capitalist order on the verge of collapse, confidently sensing that people are waking up and a significant victory is on the horizon. Others were less optimistic, more concerned, believing that the forces of the old order are still alive and very able to defend their interests. Some were less sure of popular support.

The discussion sometimes lingered on generalities that make me impatient and uncomfortable (specifically broad criticisms of capitalism and celebrations of socialism), but they moved beyond empty rhetoric, impressed as the participants were both by Zimmerman’s long history of bringing major issues to the public’s attention, leading to political action, and by the recent successes of OWS in doing the same thing. The discussion was among colleagues. The OWS people say comrades, a term that makes me feel uncomfortable given my experiences around the former Soviet bloc.

The relationship with more conventional politics was an issue, as was the intersection of race and class in and out of the movement. One seminar participant, Jan Gross, strongly argued for a position that I find attractive. Prevailing political institutions, in the close connection between the government and the corporate powers, enforce inequality, but the system is open to cooptation (unlike the situation in authoritarian dictatorships). The liberal order’s democratic qualities can be utilized for progressive change. Lawrence Weschler passionately argued for a specific course of direct action, a mass boycott of under water loans mortgages and student loans, and extensive discussion about the boycott. Radical pragmatic action would both engage the public and address some severe problems, which affect many people. This led to the discussion about the relationship between the social movement, and class and race. An African American OWS activist forcefully argued that the problem of the poor is not about student loans and mortgages but community schools and drug arrests. Class and race divides society and social movements, but he suggested also the people around the Flying Seminar table. The problems of the middle class and the poor are related, but they are also different.

A constitutional amendment was discussed (money does not equal speech), as was a national student strike. One person declared that capitalism had to be saved from itself, while others reflected on the “S” word, socialism. (This reminded me of discussions on the left in the 1930s.) The broad strategy of building alternatives “on our own” was measured against active engagement with more conventional political institutions and the possibility of a third party.

Different tactics reveal different commitments, Zimmerman observed in his closing reflections. But, acting together is the key imperative. The path to power and radical change is paved by organizing, to which he has dedicated his life.

I regret missing this interesting discussion. As I was watching the video, I imagined how I might have spoken up. I may have expressed my conviction that all the talk about socialism, as some kind of systemic alternative to capitalism, is silly. I might have asked people to explain how it is they imagine a modern economy can be organized. But that probably would not have improved the discussion. But there are issues I would have liked to discussed: how a protest movement can move from saying no to injustice to figuring out how to do something about the injustice, what role do political leaders play, and what social activists can accomplish and how that relates to more conventional political agents in parties and states?

There is a proposal before the OWS General Assembly in New York today concerning a statement of solidarity with Occupy Oakland. In it, there is the declaration:

“We affirm Occupy Oakland’s freedom to use whatever means necessary to further
your [and our] struggle. A diversity of tactics is necessary, and it
means that there is no correct method to resistance. We trust our
comrades to make your own choices for your own community.”

Really by any means necessary? Aside from the questionable ethics of such a statement, I wonder how the people who consider it think it relates to the broad American public. How does the movement, which speaks in the name of the 99%, relate to the 99%? I think that the statement will be rejected. But it highlights the importance of the issues and experiences discussed at the last meeting of the Flying Seminar, and it suggests what we should examine in our next meeting.

It seems to me that it is crucial to think about the relationship between the movement and more conventional politics. I think that the relationship between OWS and Obama and the Democrats is similar to the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and Kennedy and Johnson and the Democrats, and some Republicans. It would be interesting to reflect upon how that worked. I am hoping that we will discuss this at the next meeting of the Flying Seminar, perhaps on the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement as it might inform the future actions of OWS.

Yesterday, I was with Steve Assael, my friend of nearly 60 years, retracing, as much as possible, his steps of ten years ago. He worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield on the 25th floor of North Tower of the WTC. The vivid specificity of his memories was moving, from the opening tragedy, the paraplegic colleague who couldn’t escape because the elevators weren’t working and his co worker who decided to stay with him, to the loneliness of direct experience, riding on the subway in Queens along with the daily commuters ten years ago and walking downtown yesterday. We spoke, walked, looked around, remembered 9/11/01 as a day of personal experience and national trauma. I wondered and worried about how the people we saw yesterday remember.  I recalled that the U.S. has been implicated consequentially in the suffering of so many others since that day. Steve and I don’t agree on such matters, but political discussion wasn’t on the agenda.

We met in Penn Station at 7:45. The time, more or less, he had arrived on his morning commute from Massapequa, Long Island, ten years ago. We took the express train downtown to Chambers Street, as he did then. Instead of a crowd of office workers, we joined the anniversary memorial ceremony, part of the general public observers (only the relatives of those who died were included in the ceremony). Steve later told me that he had hoped that by chance he would bump into one of the hundreds of people whom he knew when he worked there. But, ironically, we met my friend and colleague Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, one of the most important and troubling books of recent decades.

We passed through a security checkpoint at 8:30. We were a couple of blocks from the memorial, with a clear view of the rising tower. We observed the ceremony on a huge television screen and listened to the reading of the names for a while, and heard the dignitaries’ readings. Our project was to wander, look around, and talk. So we moved on after my friend Mike Asher’s name was read off. My book, The Politics of Small Things, is dedicated to Mike and was an imagined extended conversation with him. Mike worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104^th floor of the North Tower.

Steve spoke to me more openly about what he had seen, heard and smelled that day than he has in the past ten years, about feeling the impact of the jet in his office, about the hesitancy to walk down, the crowded stairwell, stopping on the 14^th floor. When people lower in the stairwell were warning about the danger of fire and smoke, he and a group of others went into an office suite there.

The phones were working. The room was illuminated (perhaps by sunlight). The assembled people weren’t sure what they should do. They then moved quickly on at the urging of a fireman, who Steve pointed out probably saved his life. The fireman was panting, running up the stairs, warning people, encouraging them to go down. Steve’s gift to the fireman was a glass of water. Steve had intended to use the water to dampen a cloth as he went through anticipated heavy smoke, but he figured the fireman needed it more than he did, and that puddles on the ground would probably work, if water was needed. At first, Steve assumed that the fireman was among the dead, but reading more about the events of the day weeks later, he holds onto the hope that the hero of his story was among the firemen who did turn back and survive.

Steve got out. The stairs were no longer crowded. He had to time his run across the plaza outside the building, avoiding falling objects and people, and the resulting obstacles on the ground. He and a colleague hesitated at the entrance of the Millennium Hotel. They wondered if they could help, watched for a while, saw the towers swaying. A cop shouted to them to get out of there. And they headed uptown. Around Chinatown, they felt the collapse. Steve’s colleague walked to Grand Central Station. Steve walked over the Queensborough Bridge, took a subway to Jamaica and caught his Long Island Railway train home.

Walking uptown and riding out of the city, Steve moved from the scene of the crime into a world that strikingly resembled normal everyday life. He, they, we, were all bewildered and dismayed, not sure what would happen next. We knew something big happened, but unsure about how we would proceed. He experienced the trauma directly. For us, it took time to sink in. And now remembering is a challenge.

As Steve and I walked back to Penn Station, I got to thinking about how we are remembering. I appreciated Gary Alan Fine’s post last week on the need to forget, the normality of it. Forgetting is an important part of remembering. In order to remember some things, we have to forget others. Certainly, we have to forget as thoroughly as we can the purported lessons of The Kids Book of Freedom: The 9/11 Coloring Book. It is clearly destructive, but also is the fear that led to the abuse of fundamental liberties in and by the United States in the past ten years. We need to remember cautiously, avoiding too easy lessons and comfortable myths.

Odd that Steve and I bumped into Jan Gross, as we started our walk uptown away from the memorial, along the promenade by the Hudson River. Jan upset memory in Poland, in his books Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest. Jan has been challenging Poland, and, more broadly, Europe to face up to the degree to which the genocide of Jews in Europe was an active Polish, and European affair, not only a German or Nazi one. They need to forget the self-righteous stories of opposition,  and realize the complexities, the degree to which heroism was accompanied by collaboration and active complicity. Not the Nazis, but their Catholic neighbors killed the Jews of Jedwabne, Gross documented. His are tough books, difficult for many to accept. They have changed my view of the world. Remembering accurately is a challenge. It requires forgetting, abandoning satisfying myths.

Walking with Steve yesterday, I realized that this is our challenge as well.