Jewish Belonging in the Second Polish Republic

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Holocaust memory casts a long shadow over interwar Polish-Jewish life. A central challenge for historical scholarship on Jews in the Second Polish Republic is to step outside of the lachrymose teleological framing that knowledge of the Holocaust provides. Indeed, the Holocaust’s weight tends to distort our understanding of the interwar era by emphasizing suffering, exclusion, and violence; while antisemitism was present, Jewish life in this period was not inherently tragic.

This panel highlights three approaches to understanding how Jews in the Second Polish Republic sought to define themselves and their communities. In children’s literature, Yiddish writers imagined Ludwig van Beethoven as a role model for young Jews, blending Enlightenment universalism with a strongly particularist sense of Jewish identity. Jewish activists used the Polish and Yiddish language press as spaces to assert their place in the newly reformed Polish nation, using abortion and birth control as topics through which they could express their concern for their country and its citizens. Finally, Jewish filmmakers used the medium to depict the diversity and richness of Polish Jews, imagining a place for them in a country where they had been for generations.

Additionally, these papers uncover forgotten histories of otherwise well-known figures, including Raphael Lemkin, Władysław Szlengel, and even Beethoven, revealing how individuals whose legacies are intimately connected with the Holocaust—or not typically connected with Jewish history at all—intervened in or became symbols in interwar Jewish life, illustrating a rich and robust era of Jewish life that deserves to be considered on its own terms.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Karen Auerbach, UNC at Chapel Hill

Papers

• Between Exclusion and Belonging: Beethoven in Interwar Yiddish Children’s Books - Jules Riegel, Harvard U

• A Cry, A Question: Birth Control and Abortion Debates in the Jewish Press - Morgan Rose Morales, UNC at Chapel Hill

• The Future of the Past: Shaul and Yitzchok Goskind’s Six Cities - Sarah Ellen Zarrow, Western Washington U

Discussant

• Karen Auerbach, UNC at Chapel Hill