On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>> But I was under the impression that there was a fairly virulent
>> anti-semitic purge inside the communist party in 1968
>
> I think that ant-Semitism of that period was a red herring, because the
> real story was the internal party struggle between reformers and
> hardliners. The reformers got an upper hand in 1956, but their power
> started eroding throughout the 1960s. 1968 was marked by student and
> intellectual protest across Europe, and the winds of that protest did not
> pass Poland. The hardliners fought back (and temporarily won) - using any
> dirty trick on the book, from organizing goon squads to beat up student
> protesters to character assassination (including anti-Semitic innuendos)
> of prominent intellectuals, and to expulsions from universities.
That's exactly how I heard it -- that anti-semitic innuendos were a tool used by hardliners to fight reform in 1956 & 1968 -- and that what made 1976-80 different was such appeals didn't work.
But that's normally exactly what people mean by an upsurge in anti-semitism: a political group making such appeals to forward an agenda.
I completely agree that these people were in no way religiously or even culturally Jewish at the time of the purge. All the ones I've met personally remained staunch leftist secularists decades later.
But of course its purges like that often upset Jews most because it seems to "prove" that assimilation is impossible, because no matter how much you assimilate, and no matter how scrupulous the country's laws, something like this can still always happen. The Dreyfus case was exactly this sort of thing.
But to be fair to Poland, the 1967 war caused a very similar split on the left in many countries in the West, including the US. Many Jewish left-liberals, who had hitherto been indifferent to Israel, found themselves spontaneously cheering its victory -- and were viscerally shocked to hear it being execrated by their close friends as a colonialist/third worlder aggressor. As we all know from recent years, taking opposite sides in a war is an extremely polarizing experience. It led to many personal fallings out and was one of the origins of neoconservatism. It is part of the answer to the puzzle of why American Jews took concern with anti-semitism to a whole new level at precisely the moment when the last quota barriers against them were falling and they were being fully accepted into the elite.
Michael