Pole/Jew brings together a group of scholars—about half of them Jewish, about half of them ethnic Poles—from the United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Canada and enlists their diverse methodological and generational perspectives to push debates over Polish-Jewish relations beyond entrenched and reductive positions. At the core of the volume are the following questions:

–What impact has the Holocaust had on Polish history and Polish literature?

–How has the Holocaust affected Polish-Jewish—and Polish—identity?

–What future is there for relations between Poland’s small Jewish minority and the country’s overwhelming ethnic Polish majority? Between Poland and Israel? Between Jews of the diaspora and ethnic Poles abroad?

–Which research areas have yet to be addressed or revisited and reexamined?

–Are there ways to move beyond the reductive notion of 1989 (i.e., the fall of the communist regime in Poland) as wall and fulcrum?

By addressing these compelling questions, this volume offers fresh perspectives and encourages a nuanced understanding of Polish-Jewish relations.

Contributors:

M. B. B. Biskupski
Robert Blobaum
John J. Bukowczyk
Patrice M. Dabrowski
Halina Filipowicz
Agnieszka Jezyk
Bozena Karwowska
Kamil Kijek
Kate Korycki
Elzbieta Kossewska
Grazyna J. Kozaczka
Stanislaw Krajewski
Adam Lipszyc
Wiktor Marzec
Alina Molisak
Stanislaw Obirek
Benjamin Paloff
Antony Polonsky
Brian Porter-Szucs
Piotr Puchalski
Roma Sendyka
Dariusz Stola
Katarzyna Zechenter
Joshua D. Zimmerman
Geneviève Zubrzycki
Slawomir Zurek

John J. Bukowczyk is a professor emeritus of history at Wayne State University and the author of numerous articles and books on immigration and ethnic history. He is the series editor for the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series from Ohio University Press and editor of Photographs from Detroit, 1975–2019.

Halina Filipowicz is a professor emerita in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her main areas of research are Polish and Polish-Jewish literature, modern intellectual history, and gender studies. In 2020, she became the first woman to serve as editor in chief of The Polish Review.