With Hero, Conspiracy and Death: The Jewish Lectures, the author has written a book of sweeping significance for readers interested in Polish history, Jewish history, and the Holocaust in which she asks troubling questions: Can a Jew be both a Jew and a Pole? Are we right to talk of worthy and unworthy death in the Holocaust? What are the implications of Adam Mickiewicz's philo-Semitism? In Zygmunt Krasinski's anti-Semitism, do we see the specter of elimination? Are humanist and enlightenment values useful in analyzing the Holocaust, or did the experience of Nazi genocide render them...

The different theoretical notions and practices of the relations between the state and religious communities in early modern Europe constitute one of the most interesting problems in historiography. Moving away from a simple -toleration- versus -non-toleration- dichotomy, the author sets out to analyse the inter-confessional relations in selected European territories in a -longue duree- perspective, between Reformation and Enlightenment. Outlining the relations between the state and the different Churches (confessions) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany,...

This book is devoted to the religiosity of the medieval Christian masses in Central and Eastern Europe and its relationship with the traditional cultures of that time. Addressing such topics as the common instruction of the three prayers and the Decalogue, "Christian" magic in everyday life, the Marian devotion, and various images of heaven and eternal damnation, the author never loses sight of his main topic: the complex and powerful interaction between medieval folklore and Christianity.

The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Polish-Belarusian borderland. It examines the dynamics of symbolic boundaries between the Catholic and Orthodox believers in their everyday lives. By analyzing the space of local cemeteries, rituals, and attitudes related to death, eating practices, and food sharing, the author points to the changing sense of ethnic identity and the feeling of familiarity and otherness. Confessionally mixed neighborhoods and families enable different forms of religious bivalency and become a crucial factor in bridging and crossing ethnic boundaries....