Knowledge Under Siege | Breaking the Frame: New School of Polish-Jewish Studies
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Book Talk
Admission: Free |
This event is a part of YIVO's series Knowledge Under Siege, which presents recent scholarship from Poland about the Holocaust and antisemitism. Each event features scholars discussing a recent book they worked on.
Breaking the Frame. New School of Polish-Jewish Studies, edited by Irena Grudzińska Gross, Konrad Matyjaszek, introduced by Jan T. Gross (Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 2022).
“Breaking the Frame: New School in Polish-Jewish Studies” edited by Irena Grudzińska Gross and Konrad Matyjaszek is a collection of the most incisive texts of the New School of Polish-Jewish Studies, a direction of critical thinking in Polish-Jewish history and in Holocaust studies. In facing the Holocaust, the New School opposes two intellectual frames. One of them is the framework of Polish nationalism, built around the myth of Polish innocence that either conceals or justifies centuries-old antisemitism. The other is the post-Cold War conviction that the history of Polish Christians’ anti-Jewish violence is an obstacle to Poland’s Western future and that the history of that structural violence should be told as the country’s harmonious and tolerant past. The authors of the volume reformulate the terms and conditions of discourses in history, cultural and literary studies, and other fields of research. Addressing the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated through Polish history, the book is founded on a thought that past violence can be overcome and prevented in the future if it is documented and worked through – intellectually as well as emotionally – together with its cultural context.
Read selections from the book.
About the Speakers
Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. She is now a professor in the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Science and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Her books include “Miłosz and the longshadow of war,” “Golden Harvest” with Jan T. Gross, “Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets,” and “The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination.” She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and published numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.
Konrad Matyjaszek is an architect and cultural studies scholar working at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His work focuses on architecture and urban spaces, Polish discourses of antisemitism and narratives of urban modernization. He published “Produkcja przestrzeni żydowskiej w dawnej i współczesnej Polsce” [The production of Jewish space in premodern and contemporary Poland] (2019), a history of Poland’s urban Jewish spaces and of cultural and spatial repression that defined their shape throughout centuries.