Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust is a historical triumph focused on the Polish Jewish ethos that developed in post-World War I, newly independent Poland. The emergence of the historian as a public intellectual, academic expert, and community leader is an inspiring saga. Opposition to Jews in Poland included mild forms of suspicion and increasingly new forms of antisemitism that were racial. Poland’s commitments under the League of Nations charters and in important sectors of its political spheres allowed Poland’s intellectuals to argue for a multi-national Poland. Polish Jewish historians argued for the rightful place of Jews in Poland’s history. Poland emerged after over a hundred years of domination by three different empires – Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Prussian. There was no unified Jewish intellectual tradition because many leaders wrote not only in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew but also in Russian and German. The emerging historians’ multiple tasks sought to bolster Jewish identity, fight the tide of antisemitism, and imagine a future intertwined in multidimensional and overlapping polities. These historians imagined Jews could be part of Poland in various ways, first and foremost by attaching to the Polish language and culture in multiple degrees. Others argued for Yiddish cultural ties and socialist economic commitments. Except for Emanuel Ringleblum, these historians are unfortunately unknown to most of us today. Through this presentation, Dr. Aleksiun will give us a glimpse of their various contributions. We learn that the first generation were exclusively men: Marceli Handelsman, Majer Balaban, Mojzesz Schorr, Filip Friedman, and Raphael Mahler. Surprisingly, they prepared a generation of women historians who completed good masters-level work, but their careers were largely unrealized because they died in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, the rise of fascism/ethnonationalism tipped over most of the aspirations for multiethnic states, but, that was not from the perspective of their reality inevitable outcome.