Joanna Sabina Tokarska-Bakir (born 1958) is a Polish cultural anthropologist, literary scholar, and religious studies scholar. She is a full professor and chair of the ethnic and national relations study at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Slavic Studies. [1] [2] [3] She specializes in blood libel, historical anthropology and in particular violence, and Holocaust ethnography. [3]
In 1983, Tokarska-Bakir received her MA in Ethnology from the University of Warsaw in 1983, and her doctorate in 1993 also from Warsaw. She completed her habilitation at Warsaw in 2001. In 2010 she was appointed full professor. [1]
In Żydzi u Kolberga, Tokarska-Bakir rejects the view that pre-modern folk antisemitism was benign, asserting that these notions assigned to Jews a "dangerous place" which could lead to destruction at any moment. Tokarska-Bakir argued that this "common sense" persists to the modern-day with explosions of hatred being latent phenomena. [4]
In her essay Poland as the sick man of Europe?, [5] she describes the public debate in Poland following the publication of Jan T. Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland on the Jedwabne pogrom as the revelation of what had been in effect a "public secret" in Poland since the massacre took place. Tokarska-Bakir's describes the debate as "an explosion of post-traumatic psychosis" in which some historians attempted to maintain Poland's identity as a victim and not as a perpetrator by discrediting the research. [6] Tokarska-Bakir asserts that empathy is the needed cure to "dispel the stupor" and "impart some critical awareness" in regards to the Jedwabne debate. [7]
Her 2008 study Legends about blood: The anthropology of prejudice is about folk legends in southeastern Poland that justified antisemitism as well as their form in modern society. [8]
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. At least 340 men, women and children were murdered, some 300 of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive. About 40 ethnic Poles carried out the killing; their ringleaders decided on it beforehand with Germany's Gestapo, SS security police or SS intelligence and they then cooperated with German military police. According to historian Jan T. Gross, "the undisputed bosses of life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," who were "the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews."
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places retrospectively became known as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
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.
The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of violence toward the Jewish community centre's gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland on 4 July 1946 by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians during which 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded. Polish courts later sentenced nine of the attackers to death in connection with the crimes.
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.
Jan Tomasz Gross is a Polish-American sociologist and historian. He is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus, and Professor of History, emeritus, at Princeton University.
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.
Anti-Jewish violence in Poland from 1944 to 1946 preceded and followed the end of World War II in Europe and influenced the postwar history of the Jews as well as Polish-Jewish relations. It occurred amid a period of violence and anarchy across the country, caused by lawlessness and anti-communist resistance against the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Poland. The estimated number of Jewish victims varies and ranges up to 2,000. In 2021, Julian Kwiek published the first scientific register of incidents and victims of anti-Jewish violence in Poland in 1944-1947, according to his calculations, the number of victims was at least 1,074 to 1,121. Jews constituted between 2% and 3% of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country, including the Polish Jews who managed to escape the Holocaust on territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, and returned after the border changes imposed by the Allies at the Yalta Conference. The incidents ranged from individual attacks to pogroms.
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.
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.
Polish Jews were the primary victims of the Nazi Germany-organized Holocaust in Poland. Throughout the German occupation of Poland, Jews were rescued from the Holocaust by Polish people, at risk to their lives and the lives of their families. According to Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Poles were, by nationality, the most numerous persons identified as rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. By January 2022, 7,232 people in Poland have been recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations.
Prof. dr hab. Szymon Rudnicki is a Polish historian. He specializes in the history of the Second Polish Republic, right-wing political movements of that era, and the Polish-Jewish relations.
Anna Bikont is a Polish journalist for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper in Warsaw. She is the author of several books, including My z Jedwabnego (2004) about the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, which was published in English as The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (2015). The French edition, Le crime et le silence, won the European Book Prize in 2011.
The Kielce Ghetto was a Jewish World War II ghetto created in 1941 by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the Polish city of Kielce in the south-western region of the Second Polish Republic, occupied by German forces from 4 September 1939. Before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Kielce was the capital of the Kielce Voivodeship. The Germans incorporated the city into Distrikt Radom of the semi-colonial General Government territory. The liquidation of the ghetto took place in August 1942, with over 21,000 victims deported to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp, and several thousands more shot, face-to-face.
Pola Nirenska, born Pola Nirensztajn, was a Polish performer of modern dance. She had a critically acclaimed if brief career in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Poland in the 1930s before fleeing the continent in 1935 due to rising antisemitism. She spent 14 years in the United Kingdom, primarily entertaining refugees, troops, and war workers. She emigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in Washington, D.C., where she was widely acknowledged as the city's leading choreographer and performer of modern dance until her death.
Ewa Kurek is a Polish historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history during World War II. She has been associated with the far-right, and her revisionist views regarding the Holocaust in Poland have been widely categorized as indicative of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
The Jew with a coin is a good luck charm in Poland, where images or figurines of the character, usually accompanied by a proverb, are said to bring good fortune, particularly financially. The motif was first described in articles from 2000, and probably dates back to the early 1990s. While widely recognized the figurines are not the most popular good luck charm in Poland.
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne is a 2004 book by Polish journalist Anna Bikont on the Jedwabne massacre, a 1941 pogrom of Polish Jews in Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland. It was translated to French in 2011 and English in 2015. It received the European Book Prize in 2011.
The program of the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party has chapters on "identity" (tożsamość) and "history policy". The implementation of the PiS history policy consists in promoting, in Poland and internationally, a version of history based on a policy of memory that focuses on protecting the "good name" of the Polish nation.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
