Boundaries—physical, political, social, religious, and cultural—were a key feature of life in medieval and early modern Poland, and this volume focuses on the ways in which these boundaries were respected, crossed, or otherwise negotiated. It throws new light on the contacts between Jews and Poles, including the vexed question of conversion and the tensions it aroused. The collected articles also discuss relations between the various elements of Jewish society—the wealthy and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, and the religious and the lay elites, considering too contacts between Jews in Poland and those in Germany and elsewhere. Classic studies by such eminent scholars as Meir Bałaban, Jacob Goldberg, and Moshe Rosman provide a foil for new research by Hanna Zaremska and David Frick, as well as Adam Teller, Magda Teter, Elisheva Carlebach, Jürgen Heyde, and Adam Kaźmierczyk. Taken together, the contributions on this central theme help redefine the Jewish history of pre-modern Poland. As ever, the New Views section examines a wide variety of other topics. These include accusations of ritual murder in nineteenth-century Poland; the Russian Jewish integrationist politician Mikhail Morgulis; the attitude of Bolesław Prus towards Jewish assimilation and his relationship with the Jewish journalist Nahum Sokolow; women in the Mizrahi movement in Poland; Polish patriotism among Jews; the impact of the first Soviet occupation of 1939–41 on Polish–Jewish relations; how the war affected the views of Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski; the shtetl in the work of American Jewish writers Allen Hoffman and Jonathan Safran Foer; and the initial Polish response to Jan Gross's Fear.

In the mid-1960s, Gomulka’s government adopted an antisemitic stance in consequence of which nearly 15,000 Jews left the country, effectively ending Jewish life in the country for over a decade. These events, long ignored by scholars, are now increasingly seen as an important step in the process that led to the collapse of communism. This volume illuminates the events that triggered the crisis, the crisis itself, and its consequences.

The focus is on how the Jews were affected by Polish independence in 1918. Other topics covered include Jan Blonski's article, 'The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto'; Polish historiography on the privileges granted to the Jews; the decline of the kahal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the social perception of Jews in the eighteenth-century; representations of Jews in nineteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century synagogues; the Jewish Polish-language press in the interwar period; and antisemitic slogans in Endecja political campaigns.

As a re-examination of Socialist attitudes to the 'Jewish question' and antisemitism, of how the growth of socialism affected relationships between Poles and Jews, and of the character of Jewish Socialist groups in Poland, it makes a significant contribution to the history of the Jews in Poland. It also sheds light on the history of Socialism in east-central Europe and the complexity of nationality problems there.

This volume focuses on Polish Jews in Germany; Zionism in Poland; and art and architecture. More specifically, this latter section considers the physical impact of the Jewish presence in Polish towns-in general, and in Góra Kalwaria, home to the Gerer hasidic dynasty; there is also a map of synagogue buildings still standing in 1988 and an inventory showing their current use, and an illustrated article on new Jewish monuments in Warsaw. Several of the remaining articles relate to Polish or Yiddish literature. Some of the articles in this volume: -Góra Kalwaria: The Impact of a Hasidic Cult on the Urban Landscape of a Small Polish Town -The Function of Synagogues in the PPR, 1988 -Polish Jews in Germany The Expulsion of Jews with Polish Citizenship from Bavaria in 1923 -The Beginnings of the Zionist Movement in Congress Poland: The Victory of the Hasidim over the Zionists? -Yiddish Literature and Collective Memory: The Case of the Chmielnicki Massacres -Polish Socialism and the Jewish Question on the Eve of the Establishment of the Polish Socialist Party (PPR) and Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland -The Conference 'Studies on the History of the Jewish Inhabitants of Silesia', Wroclaw, 1998 Contributors Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Józef Adelson, Mark Baker, Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Eleonora Bergman, Andrzej S. Ciechanowiecki, Artur Eisenbach, John P. Fox, Jedrzej Giertych, Joseph Goldstein, Karel Grünberg, Jan Jagielski, Stanislaw Jankowski, Paul Latawski, Krystyn Matwijowski, Jadwiga Maurer, Moshe Mishkinsky, Israel Oppenheim, Adam Penkalla, Maria and Kazimierz Pietchotka, Krzysztof Pilarczyk, Tomasz Polanski, Laura Quercioli-Mincer, Chone Shmeruk, Laurence Weinbaum

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish­Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories in a comprehensive way. Until 1989, Polish consciousness of the Second World War subsumed the destruction of Polish Jewry within a communist narrative of Polish martyrdom and heroism. Post-war Jewish memory, in contrast, has been concerned mostly with Jewish martyrdom and heroism (and barely acknowledged the plight of Poles under German occupation). Since the 1980s, however, a significant number of Jews and Poles have sought to identify a common ground and have met with partial but increasing success, notwithstanding the new debates that have emerged in recent years concerning Polish behaviour during the Nazi genocide of the Jews that Poles had ignored for half a century. This volume considers these contentious issues from different angles. Among the topics covered are Jewish memorial projects, both in Poland and beyond its borders; the Polish approach to Holocaust memory under communist rule; and post-communist efforts both to retrieve the Jewish dimension to Polish wartime memory and to reckon with the dark side of the Polish national past. An interview with acclaimed author Henryk Grynberg touches on many of these issues from the personal perspective of one who as a child survived the Holocaust hidden in the Polish countryside, as do the three of his poems reproduced here. The 'New Views' section features innovative research in other areas of Polish­ Jewish studies. A special section is devoted to research concerning the New Synagogue in Poznan, built in 1907, which is still standing only because the Nazis turned it into a swimming-pool. For contents press here .

When Poles and Jews emigrated to North America, the relationship between them developed in new ways. This volume looks at various aspects of that relationship, past and present. Key topics include literary and journalistic representations; institutional contacts; attitudes to the Holocaust; the debate over Jedwabne; physical violence and initiatives for mutual understanding. As usual in Polin, substantial space is also given, in 'New Views', to recent research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies.

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study of Jewish women in eastern Europe is still in its infancy. The fundamental task of historians to construct women as historical subjects, 'as a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent of the narrative', has only recently begun. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the study of Jewish women's experiences in Eastern Europe. The guest editors for this volume are Paula Hyman of Yale University, a leading figure in Jewish women’s history in the United States, and ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University, author of a prize-winning study on Jewish divorce in nineteenth-century Russia. Their introduction provides a much-needed historiographic survey that summarizes the major work in the field and highlights the lacunae. Their contributors, following this lead, have attempted to go beyond mere description of what women experienced to explore how gender constructed distinct experiences, identities, and meanings. Among them, Shulamit S. Magnus analyses perhaps the best-known memoir written by an east European Jewish woman—Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Jewish Grandmother. Ellen Kellman explores the life of a prominent Jewish feminist whose activism was shaped by the devastating impact of the First World War. Moshe Rosman considers the question of whether Jewish women in eastern Europe had power. There are two chapters on the education of Jewish women in eastern Europe (Eliyana Adler, Carole Balin), and two on Jewish women who converted to Christianity (ChaeRan Freeze, Rachel Manekin). Tova Cohen considers how female authors writing in Hebrew encoded their gender concerns in their writing, while Ewa Plach demonstrates the concerns of cosmopolitan bourgeois and intellectual Jewish women. Her analysis of a Zionist women’s Polish-language feminist newspaper illustrates the heterogeneity of Polish Jewish womanhood and the hybrid nature of Jewish identity. In seeking to recover lost achievements and voices and place them into a broader analytical framework, this volume is an important first step in the rethinking of east European Jewish history with the aid of new insights gleaned from the research on gender.

This volume is devoted to the part Jews played in the history of Lódz between 1820 and 1939. Specifically, it focuses on the place of the Jews in the industrial elite of this multi-ethnic textile town, and on its role as a centre of the modern movement and of Jewish artistic and literary creativity. It is the result of a collaborative venture with the Historical Institute of the University of Lódz.

In this volume, articles on Jewish Warsaw over the centuries cover the history of jewish settelment; Jewish populations in the eighteenth century; the background to the 1790 pogrom; relations with Christians in the early partition period (1795-1861); the acculturation of the nineteenth century; Warsaw as a Yiddish literary centre; Jewish Warsaw before the first world war; the history of the Warsaw ghetto; and Jewish historians Emanuel Ringelblum and jacob Shatzky. Other topics covered include the religious orders and the Jews during the holocaust, and the integration of the Jews in Radom.

In the period between the two world wars, Poland's Jewish community of three million was second only in size to that of the United States, and was the laboratory in which the ideological orientations which dominated the Jewish world—Zionism, Bundism, Neo-Orthodoxy, assimilation—were tested. There has been much disagreement as to the character and strength of antisemitism in Poland at that time, and the extent to which it aided the Nazis in carrying out their genocidal plans. This volume of Polin includes contributions from Poland, western Europe, Israel, and North America that together provide a clearer understanding of the issues which have in the past proved so divisive. It also includes a number of personal testimonies from people who experienced the interwar period at first hand.

Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus on elite culture and canonical literature. Even modern Yiddish culture has generally been approached from the perspective of ‘great works’. This special issue on Jewish popular culture focuses on relatively less explored but historically vital forms of culture that have previously been relegated to the margins of scholarly interest. Most of the articles look at the period before the Second World War, but there are also several studies of the traces of this culture in the contemporary world. The volume is intended to help reconfigure our understanding of Polish Jewish civilization in its true richness and variety.