Decolonizing Memory: Jewish Revival in Contemporary Poland

SLAV-S 540

Course Description
Out of the roughly 3.3 million Polish Jews inhabiting the territories of the Polish Republic before the Second World War, approximately 10% survived the Holocaust. The postwar emigration further drastically reduced the number of Jews living in contemporary Poland. Why, then, did the collapse of communism in 1989 after decades of the politics of national homogeneity mark the beginning of a renewed interest in “things Jewish” by non-Jewish Poles? Could there be a Jewish revival without Jews? Who revives what, for whom, and why? What kind of decolonization of the mainstream cultural memory conditions the revival? What cultural anxieties, historical confusions, and identity constructions emerge in contemporary Polish-Jewish literature, performance, social events, religious life, and material culture?

From the debates on Polish complicity in the Holocaust through the vagaries of Holocaust tourism to the third and fourth generations’ nostalgia and anger and the “redemptive cosmopolitanism” of Jewish Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź, we will map out the symbolic and material landscape of “Jewish return” in contemporary Poland.