By Malgorzata Bakalarz, July 9th, 2012 
In this post Malgorzata Bakalarz deliberately responds to my posts on Polish Jewish relations from the point of view of a young Polish scholar studying in New York. I deeply appreciate her update. Jeff
At the end of his text “Why Poland?” Jeff recalls the exchange between Adam Michnik and Leon Wieseltier about Polish-Jewish relations and the public discussion about Jedwabne pogrom. He makes a statement that could become a title of a new book on Polish-Jewish relations (or, perhaps, on Polish-Polish relations). He summarizes the exchange, acknowledging the importance of the Jedwabne discussion and concludes: “but something is missing.”
Something, indeed, was missing, and that was patience and sympathy.
The debate around Jedwabne, although groundbreaking and influential, was still in most cases elitist and center-oriented. Observing it, I was under the impression that default ways of framing the Jedwabne discussion were established very early on, and it was somehow impossible to contribute outside of them. And the situation was extremely sensitive: content-wise, it was urging Poles to embrace their difficult past, to admit it’s not exclusively heroic character, when there was still a largely unsatisfied need for the public acknowledgment of the Polish suffering: from the Soviet system, from the WWII, from the 19-century partitions.
“Formally,” the official narratives about Jedwabne ignored familiar Roman Catholic rhetoric, known and trusted as the “language of truth.” Dry, factual descriptions of the event, and the discussions about it, left no room for dramatic, stilted (but familiar), ceremonial, timeless narrative, which had been framing anti-communist discourse for so many years.
The legacy of Communist “parallel realities,” with corrupted and not trusted public discourse confronted with the private, (mainly) Roman-Catholic, reliable one, made this “linguistic estrangement” of Jedwabne debate an important issue. It contributed to the fact that many dismissed the debate altogether: unacceptable content confirmed by unacceptable “official” (read: not ours) language.
Not enough time was spent to translate and make available the discourse about complex Polish-Jewish past, and, in particular, about complex Polish war history. Not enough time was spent to listen to the voice of people from the outside . . .
Read more: Why Poland? 3.5, Confronting a Difficult Past
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, 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, April 9th, 2012 
This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.
A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”
I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”
Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.
The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 9th, 2012 My mother was not pleased when I told her that I would be going to Poland to do my dissertation research, thirty-five years ago. “Why Poland?” This was not a simple or innocent question, motivating it were the horrors of the twentieth century, and the pain and suffering of her family. For, I am the grandson of Victor and Brana Frimet who came from the small town of Bulschwietz near the city of Lemberg (Lwow to the Poles, Lviv, to the Ukrainians). The Frimet’s memories of their times in that place, then Poland, were not sweet. This was a town, a city, a nation and a region where multiculturalism has not been a very happy matter, as it was not for much of twentieth century Europe, especially for my people. My grandparents left in 1920, and they never looked back, never regretted leaving “the land of their fathers.” Our relatives who remained perished in the Holocaust. Why, then, was I going back?
My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth. I was looking for adventure. I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my studies. I had a good dissertation proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major foundation was willing to pay for a year’s preparation and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe. This was a great opportunity, both personal and professional. For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and understood, but not something that should restrict my ambitions and plans. In retrospect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”
Because I was not restricted by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remember and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents. But the insight of my mother’s question persists. It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us understand the problems of clashing collective memories . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, February 27th, 2012 
Last night at the Academy Awards, the Iranian film, “A Separation,” won the best foreign film prize. The Polish film, “In Darkness,” did not win, even though it is an important film about the Holocaust. I imagine Malgorzata Bakalarz, a Polish art historian studying sociology in New York, is pleased. -Jeff
I remember the joke among my friends – photographers and filmmakers – repeated each time when someone would read a film review in a newspaper. “Why are all the film critics unemployed in Poland? – Because sociologists and historians write better film reviews. – And why’s that? – Because it’s all about important movies, not the good ones.”
Indeed, “important” is not a formal category for judging a film, and it should not be a category to discuss “In Darkness” by Agnieszka Holland, either. Holland depicts a true story about Leopold Socha, Polish sewage worker, who saved a group of Jews, hiding them in sewage in Lviv (now in Ukraine). And yet many reviewers were terrorized by the importance of the content and do not really address the form. Is it really so that to watch films touching on important issues one needs to become “a patriot,” “a pacifist,” or “anti-Fascist” instead of remaining simply “a viewer”? And why does a critique of a film on Holocaust seem to be anti-Semitic? The terror of “important movies” is truly a noteworthy phenomenon.
“In Darkness” is not a masterpiece, no matter how important its subject. In it, Holland, the distinguished Polish director, is guilty of the sin of excess (or indecisiveness): among many different angles of the story and many ways of telling it – she has chosen everything. The effect is a lot of unnecessary scenes that make the large picture (sic!) blurry. Should we fully recognize the main protagonist’s transformation, from a crook that wants to get rich on others’ tragedy into a righteous gentile? Or, rather, should we meditate on complex dynamics between the group of Jews – fled from the ghetto to be forced to select among themselves the ones who would die, the “selected” fleeing . . .
Read more: The Terror of Important Films: “In Darkness” (Spoiler Alert)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 21st, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “For and Against Memory” click here.
A few years ago, I had a couple of opportunities to present publicly my thoughts on collective memory: at the annual memory conference at The New School and at an interdisciplinary conference on resistance and creativity in Cerisy, France. Collective memory was then an emergent major concern internationally, and it has been a long term interest of mine, starting with my analysis of the way collective memory served as a base for independent public expression and action in Communist societies (published in my one and only piece in the premier sociology journal, The American Journal of Sociology). There was a kind of vindication for me in these developments.
While collective memory is now hot, I have long been interested in a topic (by the way informed by the work I did with Edward Shils, which indicates how I have learned from a conservative thinker as I have suggested in earlier posts). Yet, I am ambivalent about this development. I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the memory’s emergent academic and public popularity, concerning two problems. I see a disturbing trend, people turning to memory as they lose political imagination (this shows that I am not a conservative). Also, a too simple identification of memory with enlightenment concerns me (a conservative concern perhaps). By underscoring the importance not only of memory, but also of forgetting, I wanted to highlight these issues in my talks in 2008. And I am posting a version of the talks here today because I think the problems remain, though many academics including some of my students and colleagues are now addressing them. In a couple of weeks, I am off to Berlin to take part in a discussion on the topic of memory and civil society, where I hope these issues will be discussed.
I should add that at that time I was composing my presentation on memory, I was working . . .
Read more: For and Against Memory: Poland, Israel-Palestine and the United States (Introduction)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 21st, 2012 Most studies of the politics of collective memory assume a kind of enlightenment prejudice. Confronting the memory of a collective trauma or accomplishment is seen as being the precondition of some sort of progressive action. Examples I have thought about, both as a scholar and a citizen, include: the Jewish and specifically Israeli confrontation with the Holocaust as a political precondition of “never again.” And in a parallel fashion, the German confrontation with the genocide understood as a requirement for a decent democratic society in the shadows of the Nazi regime. The need to “re-remember” the trauma of slavery in the United States, as Toni Morrison put it in her classic novel, Beloved, as a way of addressing the enduring problems of race and racism in America. The need of Poles to remember their history apart from communist ideology as a way of developing an independent democratic movement in the 70s and 80s, contributing to the great events of 1989.
An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history, Judith Shapiro. He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China, confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free.
Poland
Then there is Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 70s and 80s, and later after the changes of ’89, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. And also importantly for me a personal friend and a friend and colleague of many at my university, the New School for Social Research, a frequent visitor since he received an honorary degree from us at the 50th anniversary of the University in Exile. He is memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in . . .
Read more: For and Against Memory: Poland, Israel-Palestine and the United States
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