CANCELED - "Making Sense of the 'Jewish Revival' in Poland"

Due to inclement weather, the lecture has been canceled.

West Bloomfield Lecture Series on Wrestling with Angels: The Struggle Between Sacred and Secular in Jewish Life

Since the fall of Communism, Poland’s small Jewish communities have undergone a significant revival, a process occurring in tandem with non-Jewish Poles’ soul searching about their role in the Holocaust and the development of their interest in Jewish culture and Poland’s Jewish past. This interest is visible in the mushrooming of Festivals of Jewish culture, the governmental sponsorship of new museums and memorials, as well as the emergence of Jewish studies programs at multiple universities. How can we make sense of this phenomenon? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and interviews, Zubrzycki shows why and how the revival of Jewish culture is part of broader process of redefinition of Polishness and the building of pluralism in contemporary Poland.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology and a Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) and the Copernicus Program in Polish Studies (CPPS). Her award-winning book, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006) examined the relationship between Polish nationalism and Catholicism, with specific attention to memory wars and the contested use of religious symbols by ultranationalist Poles at Auschwitz. It was recently translated into Polish (Krakow: Nomos, 2014). Prof. Zubrzycki is currently completing a new book on the on-going revival of Jewish communities in Poland and non-Jewish Poles’ interest in all things Jewish. She has published on the topic in several journals and edited volumes.

Sponsored by: Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies and JCC's Seminars for Adult Jewish Enrichment