Antony Polonsky | |
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 Polonsky, Mordecai Paldiel, Wojciech Kozłowski, Jenni Frazer (2020) | |
| Born | September 23, 1940 Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Alma mater | University of the Witwatersrand |
| Occupation | historian |
| Honours |  |
Antony Barry Polonsky (born 23 September 1940) is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. [1] He is the author of many historical works on the Holocaust, [2] and is an expert on Polish Jewish history. [3] [4] [5]
Antony Polonsky was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who arrived in South Africa in the late 19th century. His father was from a Yiddish speaking family from near Grodno (in modern Belarus) and his mother was from a Russified Jewish family from Lithuania. Polonsky was not raised in a Polish speaking background. [6]
Polonsky has compared his childhood, growing up in South Africa, to the movie The Help , being brought up by African servants who had no political rights. As a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, Polonsky organised non-violent demonstrations against apartheid policies. [7] A Rhodes Scholarship took him to England to read modern history at Worcester College and St Antony's College. His doctoral thesis [8] at Oxford was a study of Józef Piłsudski's relationship with parliament, subtitled: The Crisis of Parliamentary Government in Poland, 1922-1931 . [9] Polonsky became a lecturer in International History at the London School of Economics in 1970, and was appointed as professor in 1989. [1] When it was discovered that Polonsky had redirected more than £24,000 of research money he had claimed in the name of colleagues and donated it to Oxford's Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies, disciplinary proceedings were instituted. Although the amount was repaid (including 15,000 from the Institute's own funds), the misappropriation, which was used to finance Institute publications, nevertheless proved highly embarrassing for Polonsky. The disciplinary committee found that although his publications had brought credit to the London School of Economics, he should be 'severely reprimanded'. He decided to take early retirement and seek a new position. [10] Polonsky then moved to Brandeis University in 1992, and in 1999 was appointed Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies—held jointly at Brandeis and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Warsaw, the Institute for the Human Sciences, Vienna and the University of Cape Town; he has also been a visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. [1]
Polonsky has played a leading role in setting up the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford, and served for six years on the Board of Deputies of British Jews, including membership of the Yad Vashem Memorial Committee. Polonsky also spent time at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London, and is an Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. [1] President Aleksander Kwaśniewski presented the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland to Polonsky in 1999. [11] In 2006, he received the Rafael Scharf award from the Judaica Foundation in Kraków for "outstanding achievement in preserving and making known the heritage of Polish Jewry". [11] He is the founder and general editor of Polin. A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies , perhaps the only scholarly publication devoted entirely to Polish–Jewish history. [12] [13] It received the National Jewish Book Award in the Eastern European Studies category in 2000. [14]
In 2011, Polonsky was awarded the Kulczycki Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for Volumes I and II of The Jews in Poland and Russia. [15]
In The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume I, Polonsky describes how "shtetl" culture emerged in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th and 17th centuries during the process of Polish colonization of the Ukraine. [16] In private towns, owned by Polish nobility and distanced from royal authority, the Jewish community assisted the landowner in turning their estates into profitable concerns. In this context, "Jewish communal autonomy became an integral part of the Polish political system. Jews appointed their own rabbis and communal authorities and collected their own taxes, for their own communities and for the state." [16]
With the partition of Poland, most Jews found themselves living under the rule of Russia. "In a single blow, a state without Jews became the largest Jewish state in the world." [16] Polonsky argues that interference with Jewish life during the reigns of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I was motivated more by the Russian rulers' integrationist policies, rather than by antisemitism. The reforms of Alexander II led to circles of integrated culture, primarily in Odesa and St Petersburg. [17] The retreat of the tsarist government from integrationist policies during the period from 1881 to 1914 led to a rise in the poverty of the Jewish masses. But a period of enormous creativity and transformation of religious culture coincided with these years of repression. [17]
Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger of Indiana University has commented that Polonsky's history of the Jews in Poland and Russia helps to “correct the nostalgic and romanticized portraits of what is sometimes considered a lost civilization, while simultaneously demonstrating the vibrancy and diversity of Jewish life in the region.” [17]
Reviewing the first two volumes of Polonsky's three volume The Jews in Poland and Russia, The Jewish Chronicle wrote that Polonsky wants "to avoid the earlier tendencies to either dismiss the eastern European Jewish experience as backward (the approach of the great German Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz) and ultimately doomed to extinction or, alternatively, to view it nostalgically post-Holocaust as an unchanging and harmonious lost world." The reviewer concludes that Polonsky succeeds in his task, but says that the books are most successful when they manage to synthesise experiences across regions and time periods, particularly in the mini-studies of Jewish Places, Jewish Literature and Women. [18]
Timothy Snyder, reviewing Volume Three of The Jews in Poland and Russia in The Wall Street Journal , praises the book but suggests that Polonsky could have made a stronger link between imperial Russia and modern German anti-Semitism. Snyder suggests that after the 1917 revolution, the White Russian commanders fled to the west, bringing with them a concept of the Bolshevik revolution as profoundly Jewish. Snyder argues that the "Judeo-Bolshevik" idea, "brought west by Russians and Baltic Germans after the Bolshevik victory in Russia's civil wars, became an integral part of Hitler's vision." Nonetheless, Snyder calls Polonsky's three volume work "a grand history in the old 19th-century style, a result all the more remarkable because he cannot have the confidence in progress that historians of that age possessed." [16]
Polonsky has written that one of the biggest issues confronting historians of the Holocaust is that all of the countries of Eastern Europe were subjected to two occupations— the German Nazi and the Soviet Russian occupation. The Poles, the Lithuanians, Latvians, and the Ukrainians, were faced with two enemies, and faced the dilemma of how to choose between them. [19] In a talk at the United States Holocaust Museum, Polonsky said:
The Jews were in a different position. For the Jews, the Nazis were unequivocally enemies, whose goal was to destroy physically Jews in Eastern Europe. The Soviets were potential allies. So we’re talking about a very complicated situation in which two totalitarian systems are in conflict, and in which a lot of innocent people on all sides are suffering. And what we need to do is to understand the complexity of these events and show some empathy for all those people—including Jews—caught up in this tragic conflict." [20]
In Volume Three of The Jews in Poland and Russia, Polonsky critiques the typology which Raul Hilberg established in his analysis of the Holocaust, dividing those involved into perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. [21] Polonsky writes that the term 'bystander' is problematic, because "the implication that the bystanders had free choice, as in the parable of the good Samaritan, either to assist the Jews or go on their way fails to take into account the nature of Nazi rule." [22] Polonski argues that those people living under Nazi occupation were subject to savage treatment, adding that "assistance to Jews was punished severely, often by death, while participation in the looting and murder of Jews was rewarded, particularly in the case of those who served in local police forces and other units subordinate to the Germans." [22] Polonsky writes that criticism of people living under German occupation in Eastern Europe is often overtly moralistic, and accompanied by unsubstantiated speculation about what these so-called 'bystanders' might have done. [22]
The Second Polish Republic, at the time officially known as the Republic of Poland, was a country in Central Europe that existed between 7 October 1918 and 6 October 1939/1944. The state was established in the final stage of World War I. The Second Republic ceased to exist in 1939, after Poland was invaded by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, marking the beginning of the European theatre of the Second World War. The Polish government-in-exile was established in Paris to replace the Second Republic in the war.
Józef Klemens Piłsudski was a Polish statesman who served as the Chief of State (1918–1922) and first Marshal of Poland. In the aftermath of World War I, he became an increasingly dominant figure in Polish politics and exerted significant influence on shaping the country's foreign policy. Piłsudski is viewed as a father of the Second Polish Republic, which was re-established in 1918, 123 years after the final partition of Poland in 1795, and was considered de facto leader (1926–1935) of the Second Republic as the Minister of Military Affairs.
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive.
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy which ended after the Partitions of Poland in the 18th century. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany and its collaborators of various nationalities, during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, called the Holocaust. Since the fall of communism in Poland, there has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture, featuring an annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programs at Polish secondary schools and universities, and the opening of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.
The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and their Lithuanian collaborators, including Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilna (Vilnius), and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is a book published in 2000 written by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross exploring the July 1941 Jedwabne massacre committed against Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Shaul Stampfer is a researcher of East European Jewry specializing in Lithuanian yeshivas, Jewish demography, migration and education.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an American historian, philologist and essayist, noted in particular for his studies of the institution of Cantonism, his critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial two volume-work about Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges' works into Russian. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University where he teaches Early Modern, Modern and East European Jewish history.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a Polish social and cultural historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland. An honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London (UCL), she focuses in particular on the collective memory of traumatic events, particularly as it relates to gender and childhood.
The Koniuchy massacre or the Kaniūkai massacre was a World War II massacre of civilians, mostly women and children, carried out in the village of Koniuchy on 29 January 1944 by a Soviet partisan unit together with a contingent of Jewish partisans under Soviet command. At least 38 civilians who have been identified by name were killed, and more than a dozen were injured. In addition, houses were burned and livestock was slaughtered. It was the largest atrocity committed by the Soviet partisans in present-day Lithuania.
Wolfgang Birkner was a German SS functionary and a Holocaust perpetrator in World War II. Birkner served as the KdS Warschau in Warsaw following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
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Monsignor Waldemar Chrostowski is a Polish Catholic priest, Bible scholar, and theologian. He is a professor of theology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. Chrostowski has attracted attention for propagating antisemitic and homophobic views.
Joshua D. Zimmerman holds the Eli and Diana Zborowski Professorial Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History at Yeshiva University. He is the author or editor of several works about the Holocaust, including Contested Memories. Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (2003) and The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 (2015).
Gershon David Hundert was a Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.
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The Alfonse pogrom was a three-day riot in Warsaw, Poland. The violence led to the destruction of several dozen brothels, and to as many as 15 deaths. Accounts and analyses of the event differ with regard to its goals and participants.
Undzer shtime was a Yiddish language newspaper published in Vilna in 1918–1920. It was published monthly from August to November of 1918, but became a daily on December 6, 1918, as the German army was retreating out of the city. The newspaper was the organ of the Lithuania Regional Committee of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Max Weinreich was the editor of Undzer shtime from December 1918 until mid-May 1919. He was succeeded by Paul Novick.
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