By Tomasz Kitlinski, January 15th, 2013 
Grassroots Political, Intellectual and Art Activism versus Censorship, Soccer Hooliganism and Far-Right Threats in the City of Lublin
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 . . .
Read more: 21 Notes on Poland’s Culture Wars, Part 1 (1- 11)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 27th, 2012 The publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors fundamentally challenged common sense understandings of Poles and Jews in Poland, as the world watched on. Gross described what happened in a remote town in Eastern. “[O]ne day, in July 1941, half the population of a small East European town murdered the other half – some 1,600 men, women and children.” He reported in the introduction of his book that it took him four years between the time he first read the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn describing the atrocities of Jedwabne, and when he really understood what happened. He read the description but was not able to process its implications. And as I observe the debate over Jedwabne, it seems to me that many people still have not been able to process the implications. Here I reflect on the meanings of the debate for better and for worse.
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 19th 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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 27th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “Why Poland? Part 3,” click here.
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 . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 3: Thinking about Jedwabne, Addressing Premature Holocaust Fatigue (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 7th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: Between Radical Hopes and Practical Projects: Reflections on the Flying Seminar Session with Bill Zimmerman
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 12th, 2011 
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 . . .
Read more: New York, N.Y., September 11, 2011
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