Contains too many riches for a brief review to do them justice ...It is instructive to see how the subject of antisemitism is reflected in the pages of this volume, especially because of the number of contributions by Polish scholars, some of them young, to a field that only a few years ago was virtually taboo in Poland.' Abraham Brumberg, Times Literary Supplement In the period between the two world wars, Poland's Jewish community of three million was second only in size to that of the United States, and was the laboratory in which the ideological orientations which dominated the Jewish...

This volume focuses on Polish Jews in Germany; Zionism in Poland; and art and architecture. More specifically, this latter section considers the physical impact of the Jewish presence in Polish towns-in general, and in Gora Kalwaria, home to the Gerer hasidic dynasty; there is also a map of synagogue buildings still standing in 1988 and an inventory showing their current use, and an illustrated article on recent Jewish monuments in Warsaw. Several of the remaining articles relate to Polish or Yiddish literature.

The less antisemitism exists among Christians, the easier it will be to unite the social forces ...and the sooner workers' solidarity will emerge: solidarity of all who are exploited and wronged ...Jew, Pole, Lithuanian.' Jozef Pilsudski, 1903 The Socialist ideals of brotherhood, equality, and justice have exercised a strong attraction for many Jews. On the Polish lands, Jews were drawn to Socialism when the liberal promise of integration into the emergent national entities of east and central Europe as Poles or Lithuanians or Russians of the Hebrew faith seemed to be failing. For those Jews...

The focus of this volume is on how the Jews were affected by Polish independence in 1918. Other topics covered include Jan Blonski's article 'The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto'; Polish historiography on the privileges granted to the Jews; the decline of the kahal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the social perception of Jews in the eighteenth century; representations of Jews in nineteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century synagogues; the Jewish Polish language press in the interwar period; and antisemitic slogans in Endecja political campaigns.

Published in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, this volume has a special section with memoirs and other material dealing with aspects of Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Topics covered in other articles include the autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer, entitled 'From the Ghetto to Modern Culture'; Jan Czynski and the question of equal rights for all religious faiths; education of Jewish women in the nineteenth century; ritual slaughter as a political issue; and the Jewish press in Krakow in the inter-war years.

Jewish life in Poland was marked by a high degree of religious intensity. The core of essays in this volume addresses some aspects of that religious and spiritual life, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within the sphere of normative Jewish belief and practice, two rival traditions emerged in Poland: that of hasidism, which focused on prayer as a means of direct communication with God and that of its mitnagdic opponents, who placed greater emphasis on learning and the interpretation of canonical texts. Different aspects of the hasidic tradition are here examined by Louis...

Austrian for almost 150 years, Galicia was a distinctive entity in east European Jewish history. Core contributions here discuss different aspects of the Austrian presence.

The assessment of the Nazi genocide in Poland, an issue which has deeply divided Poles and Jews, lies at the core of this volume. Also included are discussions of Polish attitudes to the nearly 300,000 Jews who tried to resettle in post-war Poland; the little-known testimony of Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder; a discussion of Holocaust victims as martyrs; and a presentation of how the Auschwitz Museum sees its future. CONTRIBUTORS Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Marta Aleksandra Baliska, Jozef Bekker, Jan Ryszard Bychowski, Alina Cala, Waldemar Chrostowski, Maria Einhorn-Susulowska, Elzbieta...

In his three-volume history, Antony Polonsky provides a comprehensive survey-socio-political, economic, and religious-of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe from 1350 to the present. Until the Second World War, this was the heartland of the Jewish world: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, while nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and many of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, their history there is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing and...

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created in 1569, covered a wide spectrum of faiths and languages. The nobility, who were the main focus of Polishness, were predominantly Catholic, particularly from the second half of the seventeenth century; the peasantry included Catholics, Protestants, and members of the Orthodox faith, while nearly half the urban population, and some 10 per cent of the total population, was Jewish. The partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and the subsequent struggle to regain Polish independence raised the question of what the boundaries of a future...