After Gross’s “Neighbors”: A New Historiography, or A New Antisemitism?

• In Event: Politicization of the Holocaust in the 21st Century in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Following revelations about the Jedwabne massacre, in Jan Gross’s “Neighbors” (2000/2001), Polish popular memory underwent “shock therapy” resulting in a reconsideration—in both popular and scholarly spheres—of Polish wartime attitudes toward the Jews. For nearly two decades, researchers expressed optimism that Poland was leading the way, in Central and Eastern Europe, in the process of “coming to terms” with a dark past.

On January 26, 2018, however, Poland passed a law criminalizing speech alleging Polish agency in the Holocaust. This law threatens a thriving community of Holocaust scholars. Polish institutions have already filed suit against scholars and newspapers over publications critical of Polish wartime behavior toward the Jews. More disturbingly, against vehement, official reactions from Israel, the United States, and the Ukraine, Polish popular discourse, led, particularly, by politicians of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS), has erupted in an unparalleled outburst of antisemitic expression.

Defenders of the new law frequently cite the “Righteous Poles,” whose alleged ubiquitousness in society should define the Polish wartime record. Still another instrumental treatment of history blurs the division between victims and perpetrators by claiming, together with the Polish Prime Minister, that “there were Jewish [as well as Polish] perpetrators.”

The current crisis reveals complex, hidden social processes behind the official gestures of “reconciliation,” and impressive academic activity: they indicate a grim social reality in which the “Jew” is yet, again, identified as the threatening “Other.”

Based on the historiographical literature and on press accounts, my presentation analyzes a process of cultural bifurcation: on the one hand, a degree of scholarly satisfaction concerning Polish successes in handling the difficult past, and, on the other, a state-sponsored discourse that denies the legitimacy of these successes, and, instead, calls for the restoration of a triumphant Polish narrative of the alleged extension of aid to Jews by a majority of Poles.

No such analysis of Polish Holocaust historiography and political discourse challenged by the present display of antisemitism has yet been written; my paper aims to fill that void.

Author

• Monika Rice, Seton Hall University