Youth, Culture and Politics among Polish Jews in the 1930s

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel wishes to examine new questions concerning the rise of mass politics in Jewish life between the world wars by focusing on the largest Jewish community in Europe. In particular, it wishes to explore the dynamics that shaped the political mobilization of Jewish youth in interwar Poland, and the complex interactions between social, cultural and political change.
With the rise of the new nation state in Europe after WWI, new modes of politics were seeking to integrate and induce the participation of new social groups into politics. As in other parts of Europe, by the 1930s Poland was increasingly plagued by a divide between radical and conservative political groups and their competing cultural visions. At the center of this process was a new social, political and cultural phenomenon called "youth", with young people serving as the most sensible barometers of change, and responding to new models in the most far reaching manner.
Focusing on Polish Jewish youth in the 1930s, the panel examines the following questions: how did Jewish youth operate as a social group in politics? What new ways were devised to mobilize them? How did political organizations try to shape the cultural consciousness of Polish Jewish youth, and to what extent were they successful? And finally, how did the term “youth” come to be intellectually defined and contested? These questions will be analyzed in reference to Jewish organizations in Poland from across the political spectrum.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel, and Other Communities

Chair

• Scott Ury, Tel Aviv University

Individual Presentations

• Faithful but transgressive? Political consciousness and patterns of cultural consumption among Jewish youth in Interwar Poland - Kamil Kijek, Center for Jewish History

• Politics across borders: Mapai and the mobilization of Polish Jewish youth - Rona Yona, Tel Aviv University

• Terror on the Jewish street? Poland's Zionist press on violence, generational conflict and the limits of youth politics - Daniel Kupfert Heller, McGill University

Respondent

• Kenneth B. Moss, The Johns Hopkins University