This is not what I said - RTFM.
I said that there was MORE anti-semitism, both attitudinal and structural, in the pre-war Poland than in the post-war Poland. The post-war socialist Poland got rid of the structural anti-semitism, but the empirical study that I quoted (which I just re-checked for accuracy) says that the surviving Jews developed more negative attitudes toward Poland after WWII, despite the removal of the institutional barriers (the time period under investigation was 1947-1950), citing, among other the Kielce pogrom.
> As to assimilation. some upper class Jews aspired to
> be Poles. Most Jews in Poland were poor people who
> lived in shtetls. The Poles didn't consider them
Wrong century. That was in the 19th century. In the 20th century, most of the Jewish population was urban, mainly Warsaw and Lodz (an industrial city SW of Warsaw), and smaller towns in central and eastern Poland. But you are right that most of them were poor.
As to the "upper class Jews aspiring to be Poles" - what you are talking about here is, for the most part, the Polish intelligentsia, which would hardly exist if it were not for these folks. I would not dismiss them so lightly.
> And W, don't give me this identity Politics crap, "I
> grew up there, this is my culture."
Where did you get that idea? That was meant to indicate that I experienced the reality first-hand, instead of reading someone's account about it. I left Poland in 1981 at the age of 29, and during my 27 or so years there I did not experience much anti-semitism in every day life, save for a few stereotypes here and there, mostly mocking the Jewish accent (but then again, they were also mocking various Polish regional dialects as well). The only exception was the 1968 student rebellion when the party hardliners used anti-semitism to discredit certain intellectuals. But I met a lot of people, either Poles of Jewish origins or those who actually considered themselves Jews, who did not experience any prejudice in personal relations with Poles.
I have to admit, though, that after the so-called "fall of communism" anti-semitism is on the rise, and I have seen some signs of that, especially in certain tabloids and also the riff-raff attitudes as told by my father, being called a "stinking Jew" by some of his long-time neighbors), but again, I do not experience that first hand when I go there. But Polish émigrés in the US - that is a very different story, I witnessed that many of these characters are anti-semitic and racist to the bone.
A broader point is that I find it particularly annoying when many US-ers form authoritative opinions about conditions in foreign countries based on texts published in the US and hold this as "evidence" against who experienced those countries first hand. A kind of "do not believe what you see, believe what I tell you" attitude. I am not talking here about historical analyses and explanations of events elsewhere (e.g. causes of wars or revolutions, etc.) but about mere factual statement about how it is "out there" without actually experiencing that first hand, and telling those who did that they are wrong.
The one notable exception from that trend I experienced was a US Army sergeant (a working class female), when I was still teaching at the Defense Language Institute. She explicitly asked me for fist-hand accounts of living conditions in Poland, because she did not trust the stories spoon-fed to her by the US government. Virtually everyone else felt obliged to tell me how the life was like out there, if they decided to talks about this subject at all.
Wojtek