By Tomasz Kitlinski, February 26th, 2013 
Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff
February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.
The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.
Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.
While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over . . .
Read more: Michnik Attacked: The Polish Culture War Escalates
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 Nachman Ben Yehuda, January 6th, 2011
When I first found out about the Rabbinical letter banning the sale or rental of property to Arabs, I noticed that my old friend and colleague, Nachman Ben – Yehuda, was quoted condemning it in the Toronto Globe and Mail. I then wrote to him asking for more extended reflections for DC. I received this post from him over the holiday weekend. He took his time, he explains, hoping for consequential official response. He offers his sober deliberate considerations. -Jeff
There are times and places where people like to stick together with their own flock, in defined, sometimes confined, geographical locations. In these locations, they live their own life style, with their own dress codes and eat their own foods. The Amish in Pennsylvania and the Jewish ultra-orthodox in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem are two examples. People outside of these communities and non-members may find it difficult to move and live in such social habitats. Moreover, in the case of ultra-orthodox communities, strangers who live in their neighborhoods and practice a non-religious life style may find themselves facing aggression and violence. I am writing about this to contrast it with the call of some rabbis in Israel not to rent apartments to Arabs in Israeli cities.
Israeli Arabs are just that – citizens with full and equal legal rights, and Israeli cities are not confined communities with a uniform worldview and way of life. Israeli cities, like most other cities of the world, are centers of diversity, including the religious and the secular, Jews, Christians and Muslims, old and young, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, etc. These cities are open. Renting an apartment is basically an economic issue. Making and publicizing a general call not to rent apartments to Arabs (or to any other culturally defined group) is quite simply racism.
The rabbinical pamphlet received very critical comments from some Israeli politicians and others, but this did not prevent activists from the Israeli right and religious right to stage a large demonstration on Thursday, December 23, 2010 . . .
Read more: Problematic Rabbinical Ruling Continued
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