"In the period since James Davison Hunter’s 1991 analysis of “culture wars” in the U.S., both the phrase and the phenomenon have become global. While culture wars are waged with distinct weapons in any given case, at stake everywhere is “the nation” and where its symbolic boundaries are drawn.
In Poland, debates over what the newly independent nation should be have shaped public life since 1989. The right favors a traditional vision of Polish identity gathered around Catholicism, conservative family values, and a national narrative emphasizing Polish martyrdom and heroism. Antisemitic tropes plague that ethnoreligious vision. The left instead espouses progressive values, promotes secularism, and engages in a critical reckoning with the participation of ethnic Poles in violent crimes against Polish Jews during and after the Second World War. In the last twenty years, progressive Poles have indeed labored to recover Poland’s Jewish past. Their efforts are visible in what is referred to as the “Jewish revival”: the opening of new museums and memorials, the development and expansion of Jewish studies programs and Holocaust research centers at multiple universities, as well as the proliferation of over forty festivals of Jewish culture throughout the country, most of them launched in the 1990s and 2000s. The current right-wing populist government now attempts to curtail this process, describing it as an anti-Polish “politics of shame.” Jews and the Jewish revival more broadly are turned into a target and a weapon in Poland’s culture wars. Why is Jewishness so politically consequential in a country with so few Jews?
This is the empirical question that guides my analysis in this new book. Theoretically, the book contributes to the scholarship on symbolic boundaries. Most of the literature has concerned the creation, maintenance, and transgression of boundaries between groups. In my work, I shift the lens to focus on how boundary work is accomplished within an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society (Poland’s population is 95% ethnically Polish and Catholic).
In this new project, I show how the Catholic right ethnicizes ideological difference such that those not supporting a vision of national identity that melds Polishness and Catholicism into a single category, Polak-katolik, are discursively made a “Jew,” yielding the curious phenomenon of antisemitism in a country with very few Jews—between 7,000 and 40,000, depending on the criteria used. The same logic is also the source of philosemitism. If for the right, “Jews” must be politically marginalized because they contaminate the nation with liberal ideals, a secular vision of the polity, and a cosmopolitan worldview, for the left they must for the same reason be resurrected, and Jewishness promoted as a crucial part of an aspirational new Poland.
The stakes are high because the fight to uncover painful historical truths and build an open, pluralistic society risks objectifying Jews and appropriating their culture for the sake of a political project."
