In Cursed: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the immediate post-Holocaust events impacting Jewish life in Poland and the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics.[…]

A Suddenly Familiar Voice

Professor Shoshana Ronen’s presentation based on her book, A Prophet of Consolation on the Threshold of Destruction will introduce us to the remarkable Polish Progressive Rabbi Ozjasz (Joshua) Thon. Until recently the legacy of Rabbi Thon’s intellectual and lived experience was shrouded by the Holocaust and subsequent events, most importantly the establishment of the state of Israel. Now, Rabbi Thon’s significance emerges for Diaspora communities committed to their national identity and to Jewish cultural and political Zionism. Today’s Jewish world may be astounded to learn that[…]

When Memory Comes, Are We Returned to Poland or New Ground?

Recent writing of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors is creating a new literary community genre. Transcending national boundaries, Second and Third Generation children of survivors are encountering each other. Dr. David Kader will lead us in his own exploration that is both literary and personal. He has recently written[…]

A Provocative Reflection on Aharon Appelfeld’s Novel

Posthumously, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld (died 2018) released his final book in English translation this Spring 2023. The haunting, evocative writer of over forty books who acquired the Hebrew language late in life may have come full circle. This last book, Poland, A Green Land’s continuity with Appelfeld’s past writing, points to the confrontation of a second generation of Israeli Jews that grew up in an “Israeli” ethos of forgetting and being alienated from their European Jewish survivor generation (VIEW PDF).[…]