Abstract
I first found out about this book by attending an Author Meets Critics panel at the Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meeting in August 2022. What caught my attention to the panel was the term philosemitism—something that I had first experienced while living in West Berlin, Germany during the mid-1980s. I recall my first day in a course I took at the Freie Universität Berlin on the history of Jews in Germany. The professor asked the students to introduce themselves and say why they wanted to take the course. Going around the table, each student gave their name and listed their major and minors. When it came to my turn, I gave my name and then said, “I’m Jewish.” And they all looked at me. After the class, one of the other students who was a young German woman came up to me and asked “So, you must be Kosher?” To which I replied, “No, I’m a vegetarian.” Then she said, “So you must be a Zionist?” To which I replied “No, not that either.” She seemed confused at my responses.
I must admit that at that stage I was really not conscious of being Jewish until I lived in Germany for three years. I grew up in the town of Great Neck, New York where 85 percent of the population was Jewish (but mostly secular). As a child, I thought that Christians were a minority (and indeed, in Great Neck, they were). I was an undergraduate at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts where around half the students were Jewish (but then again secular). We had a token number of Jews who had a stronger identity but the rest of us didn’t seem to care much about it.
It wasn’t until I lived in Berlin, that I became self-conscious of about being Jewish. I remember my first visit to the doctor’s office there. The receptionist asked my name in German: “Wie heißen Sie?.” I answered with an American pronunciation: “Warren Goldstein.” Not understanding, she asked “Was? Verstehe Ich nicht” (What? I don’t understand.). I repeated but she became frustrated and asked me to write it down. When I did she exclaimed “Ach, Warren Goldstein!” this time giving the German pronunciation of it using the V sound for the W and pronouncing the I after the E thus returning it to its original German meaning (after all, it is a German-Jewish name—something which was given by American immigration authorities to my great grandfather because he probably couldn’t write with a Latin alphabet; his last name was Milszstejn).
Once I learned to pronounce my name in German, I always got the same reaction there: “Ist das deutsche Abstammung” (Is that German derivation?)—a term denoting ancestry which was used in the identification of Jews in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Seeking to protect my identity, when people asked me my name, I tried to avoid giving them my surname. But when they probed, picking up a line from Costa Gavras’s The Confession, I sardonically replied, “Nein, jüdische Abstammung” to which only silence followed.
One time when going to the Ophthalmologist in my neighborhood for a new prescription, the doctor, who was about seventy years old, began to shake and tremble. He said “Verzeihen Sie mir! Ich habe mitgemacht. Wir alle haben mitgemacht.” (Please forgive me. I took part in it; we all took part). He then proceeded to tell me how the neighborhood in which I lived (Schöneberg) was once a Jewish neighborhood, then in the middle of the night, the Nazis came, dragged them out of their apartments, and took them away.
With these repeated experiences, I began to feel like a ghost in Berlin. I became homesick and longed for my Aliyah to New York.
In 1989, when the wall came down, I seized on the opportunity to travel through Eastern Europe without having to get a visa. One of the last stops I made was in Warsaw, Poland. I found a cab driver who spoke English and who had some Jewish ancestry. He took me to Szczuczyn and Grajewo, two shtetls where my paternal great grandparents came from. We went to the place where the synagogue had been, which was replaced by a movie theater. We drove out to the Jewish cemetery. There was a fence around it, a sign in Polish which stated the date in 1941 the Nazis came and liquidated the Jewish population in the town, and mounds of earth where each grave was but no gravestones (they had been taken by the Nazis).
****************************************************************************** In her book Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviéve Zubrzycki’s provides the historical background of the unique place that Poland was for the Jews. Before World War II, there were 3.5 million Jews living in Poland thus comprising 10 percent of it its population and making it the European country with the largest number of Jews. Warsaw with a Jewish population of 400,000 was the epicenter of Polish Jewry; Jews comprised approximately one-third of its population. Ninety percent of the Jewish population of Poland was exterminated during the Holocaust and most of those who did survive relocated elsewhere (11, 33). One of the questions that remains a point of contention is to what degree ethnic Catholic Poles participated in the Holocaust (6). Whereas before the Holocaust, ethnic Catholic Poles comprised 65 percent of Poland’s population, after the war with its ethnic cleansing and new drawn borders, its population became 95 percent thus making it more homogeneous than ever before (13–14, 17). After the 1968 student uprising in Poland, the Polish United Worker’s Party blamed the uprising on the Jews purging thousands from public offices and stripping them of their citizenship thereby motivating many to emigrate (76). Even so, given the long history of Jews in Poland, it is estimated that between 40,000 and 100,000 Poles have some Jewish ancestry (12). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Poland has experienced a Jewish revival paradoxically driven by non-Jewish Poles and it is this paradox which Zubrzycki explores (13). This coincides with the rise to power of the far-right Law and Justice Party, which focuses on Polish ethnic identity as Catholic and conservative. The seizure on the memory of Poland’s Jewish past and bringing it into the present is an attempt to counterbalance this conservative orientation with one that is more progressive, secular, pluralistic, and multicultural (1, 13, 25). After an introductory chapter providing this background and context, in the remaining chapters Zubrzycki goes into the memory projects through which by calling to attention to Poland’s Jewish past, they seek to make conscious the absence of Jews in contemporary Poland (35). Chapter 3 “The Way We Were” focuses primarily on the “I Miss You, Jew” project which had a website containing testimonials of remembrances of Poland’s Jewish past (39). At the end of the chapter, she contrasts the positive reception of this with the negative reception to the “Burning Barn” project in which a barn was symbolically burned, thus commemorating when a thousand Jews were placed in a barn by ethnic Poles during the Holocaust and burnt alive (86). Chapter 4 provides a description of the most impressive museums in Poland that have been established to memorialize its Jewish past including Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory Museum in Kraków (88) made famous by Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List and the Warsaw Uprising Museum (110). Chapter 5 focuses on the creation of Jewish festivals throughout Poland, the largest being Kraków’s Jewish Culture Festival (118). It led to the spread of other festivals and eating establishments throughout Poland in which there is an attempt to re-create Poland’s Jewish past by participants donning Jewish attire of the past, serving Jewish food, playing Klezmer music, etc. In a certain segment of the ethnic Polish population, it is hip to be Jewish (147). Some display this hipness by wearing stars of David, kippah, and other Jewish paraphernalia. In her description of this, it comes across as kitsch in its cultural appropriation (136, 138, 141). Zubrzycki spent significant time at the Jewish Community Center in Kraków interviewing non-Jewish volunteers there in order to get a sense of who they were and what motivated them. Most of them were enrolled in universities when they began their volunteer work (144). It is here where she finds that they do it out of a sense of cultural opposition (148). Chapter 6 “Coming Out” delves into the attempt by some Poles to uncover their own Jewish past. In this chapter she describes a Birthright trip in which she accompanied a group of Polish Jews on their trip to Israel. In interviewing the participants, what she found was that many felt out of place there and that the trip was really geared toward American Jews. In her conclusion, she problematizes Poland’s philosemitism arguing that the way Jewish revival is done in Poland, it only reinforces boundaries; the solution for her lies is separating Polish identity from Catholicism (195–196). The book provides two appendices, the first on her meticulous research methodology and the second providing a timeline of Jewish life in Poland from 1945 to 2021. Although as a sociological case study, it is appropriately theoretically framed with academic concepts such as Otherness, what I found more interesting is the empirical material itself. Nevertheless, her analysis of how resurrecting the Jew in Poland is counterhegemonic to ethnic Polish nationalism is equally compelling. Overall, it is a very rich, well-done, and engaging study of collective memory. But ironically, more than anything else, it made me want to visit Poland again so I can better understand not only my own family’s past but Poland’s contemporary bifurcated collective psyche.
