In response to threats made by right-wing “patriot” hooligans to interrupt the grand ceremony, Zygmunt Bauman has recently rejected the honoris causa degree he was to be awarded by the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw. He said he did not want to cause any more trouble after his lecture had been interrupted in June by a crowd of young aggressive men, shouting out nationalist and xenophobic slogans. They are becoming a disturbingly familiar sight in large Polish cities. In their eyes, Bauman is not a famous scholar, but a Jewish Communist collaborator, a disgrace to the Polish nation. He is probably the biggest Polish name in the social sciences since Florian Znaniecki, and far more popular than are the hooligans. His books can be found in most trendy bookstores around the world. The university decided to grant him the degree against the “patriotic storm,” but given the swirling controversy, to cancel the customary lecture. The decision was cheered by some commentators, while others accused the institution of exploiting the scholar’s name for its own benefit.
Indeed, Bauman’s past as an officer of the Polish Communist army in the Stalinist period, a time remembered for painful repressions and murders of anti-Communist war heroes, raises questions. In fact, one of the major Polish universities initially wanted to grant Bauman an honorary degree in the mid-2000s, only to ax it when a number of scholars voiced their disapproval. The simple explanation is envy, but Bauman’s past is deeply troubling. His interview, conducted still in 2010, but published in the main Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza a week after the interrupted lecture, explained his involvement in Communist structures as a young man’s infatuation with ideology, but given his close ties to the apparatus of violence, the answers felt to many to be too easy.
The question is, how do you judge outstanding scholars (or artists, or politicians, etc.) who have complicated pasts? According to popular Polish imagination, the nation’s famous figures should be flawless. They are to be “monuments more durable than bronze,” as Horace once described poets. . . .
Read more: (Dis)Honoring Zygmunt Bauman in Poland
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 19th, 2012 Is democracy sick of its own media? I seek to address the question before us, with a clear and forceful answer: yes, and no, but with no maybes. Yes, when it comes to certain emerging media conventions, revealed most vividly in the U.S. by Fox News (and its lesser imitators of the right and the left). But no, when it comes to an opposing and promising trend, the ongoing struggle to inform and constitute publics capable of deliberate discussion and informed actions, using a variety of media forms, new and old, but especially new. This trend is observable both in the central arena and, especially, on its margins, as a global development. I think that there are troubling trends in the dominant media, but I also think that it is important to pay attention to counter trends, and to take note of a new kind media war in political culture.
The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, . . .
Read more: Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 18th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis, click here.
This is the second in a three part “In-Depth” post reflecting on the relationship between Jews and Poles in the relatively recent past, as I have observed this relationship over the last forty years. In the first part, I reflected upon the circumstances that led me to engage in Polish cultural and political life and upon my initial experiences during my research there in the 1970s. In this post, I address the conflicting collective memories of Poles and Jews, particularly as they worked to remember together in a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in August 1995.
I observed the event from a distance in New York, reading newspaper accounts from The New York Times and other foreign sources (from which the non-digitized quotes in the account are drawn). Viewing the event from the outside emphasized my ambiguous connection with the memory conflicts. As an American Jew, with many relatives who viewed this with little or no knowledge about the Communist experience, I understand their dismay about apparently insensitive things said and done by the Polish authorities. But as a scholar engaged in Polish affairs for much of my adult life, I realize how difficult it is to respectfully remember the Shoah when its existence was systematically underplayed, distorted and even silenced by the Communist authorities, and, in addition, when much of the Western world hasn’t recognized the degree of Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis. I noted that even people of good will under these circumstances have great difficulty getting beyond their own limitations and reinforce misunderstandings and worse.
In my next “Why Poland?” post, I will explore what happened when all of this exploded out in the open, in controversies over Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors. It is a difficult book with a very difficult central finding, the Polish Catholics in a small Polish town, Jedwabne, killed their Jewish neighbors in mass, on their own, without Nazi direction. The . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 18th, 2012 The anger and recriminations between Poles and Jews in the days leading up to the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz threatened to overshadow their shared commemoration of their common suffering. Fundamentally conflicting memories led to offense and fed hatreds. For the Jews, the meaning of Auschwitz is summarized by the notion of the Holocaust, the Shoah. It is the symbol of the project of Jewish annihilation. While it is clear that people of a vast array of ethnic, cultural, sexual, national and religious backgrounds suffered in Auschwitz, the Jewish suffering has special significance. The death camps were constructed to exterminate Jews. This was the culmination of Jewish persecution in Christian Europe.
Poles, that is, Polish Catholics, see things differently. Nearly twenty percent of the Polish population died during the war. Seventy five thousand Polish (Catholic) lives were lost in Auschwitz; a high percentage of the surviving inmates of the camp were Polish. The memory of Polish losses is one of close experience. From the Polish point of view, the international community has failed to recognize the depth and extensiveness of Polish suffering. For Jews and for many others in the West, the immensity of the Nazi crimes has been summarized by the figure six million, six million Jews from throughout Europe consumed by the Nazi death machine. In Poland, the number has been remembered in a different way: six million Poles killed during the war (half of whom were Jewish, but this conventionally is not noted).
It was with this background that the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation was marked. Many Jewish organizations and individuals found the Polish plans for the ceremony wanting, and many Poles viewed their objections with suspicion. The World Jewish Congress threatened to boycott the commemoration entirely. In its judgment, the Polish authorities were trying to transform the ceremonies into a Polish event. At times, the rhetorical conflict over the planning of the event became very tough. Michel Friedman, a leading Jewish spokesman and member of the German Christian Democratic Party, complained that equal representation of Polish Christian and Jewish victims presented a gross misrepresentation of history. He declared: “If I recall the history precisely, I have to say that the . . .
Read more: Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 14th, 2011 
I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.
Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.
The place of the occupation in an important way contributes . . .
Read more: In Review: OWS, The Ground Zero Occupation
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