Polish anti-semitism

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jun 26 12:29:14 PDT 2001


I am quite familiar with the issue, which is currently hotly debated in Poland. This is actually what I had in mind when I wrote the original missive. The bottom line appers to be like this: after the Red Army entered Poland in 1939, many Jews were openly pro-Communist which offended the sensibilities of some rabidly nationalistic Polish rightwingers. So after the Nazis invaded the USSR and the Red Army withdrew, the nationlists took a revenge, which took a particularly ugly turn in Jedwabne (but there were other attacks as well). As I understand it, the points being contested in the debate are the scale of the massacre, and whether it was "justified" given the openly pro-communist stance of the Jewish community.

This is consistent with the points I tried to make, namely:

- communist authorities curbed anti-semitism, or perhaps its worst excesses (the perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre who were apprehended after the war were sentenced under the communist government); - ideology and religion were generally more important dividing factors than race in E.Europe (Jews were ususlly defined in those terms, rather than a separate ethnicity).

wojtek

in the aftermnaAt 10:41 AM 6/26/01 -0700, you wrote:
> You read the new Jan T. Gross vol. from Yale Univ. Press, on the village
>in Poland that slaughtered the Jews en masse w/o the Nazis, yet? TNR
>recently had Michnik and Wieseltier debating the issues.
>Michael Pugliese
>
>
>



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