YIVO, Columbia, and Fordham’s In Dialogue Series on Polish-Jewish Relations Concludes with Daylong Conference

(New York, NY) – The 2018-2019 In Dialogue: Polish-Jewish Relations series concludes with a daylong conference on Sunday, May 5, 2019, beginning at 9:00am, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The conference brings together top scholars to discuss Polish-Jewish relations after World War II.

The scholars include Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Gabriel Finder, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Erica Lehrer, Magda Teter, and Katrin Stoll.

The day will culminate with a discussion panel covering contemporary issues such as Żydokomuna (Jewish Communism), Polish nationalism, antisemitism, Polish complicity in the Holocaust, and Poland’s controversial law concerning World War II and the Holocaust. The panel will be moderated by Andrew Silow-Carroll (Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Telegraphic Agency), with panelists Michael Steinlauf, Stanisław Krajewski, Anna Bikont, and Molly Crabapple.

View the full schedule

This series is co-presented by Fordham University, Columbia University, YIVO, American Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Center for Jewish History, Leo Baeck Institute, and Yeshiva University Museum.

Previous programs in this series explored the complex history of Poland, with its shifting borders, focusing on the shared past of Polish Jews and Christians. The sessions provided historical and cultural tools to foster better understanding of Poland’s history, and of the tensions between history and memory, exclusion and belonging, national ideologies, identities, and antisemitism. Previous programs in the series included In Dialogue: Polish-Jewish Relations in the Pre-Modern Period, In Dialogue: Polish-Jewish Relations during the Interwar Period, and In Dialogue: Polish-Jewish Relations in the Pre-Modern Period. Learn more about the entire series.

Program: In Dialogue: Polish Jewish Relations Conference
When: Sunday, May 5, 2019, 9:00am – 5:30pm
Where: YIVO at the Center for Jewish History | 15 West 16th Street • New York, NY 10011
Tickets are Free | Reservations Available at: yivo.org/InDialogueConference

For any media inquiries please contact:

Alex Weiser
Director of Public Programs
(212) 294-6152

PARTICIPANTS

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2005), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), as well as two edited volumes, and numerous articles in English, Italian, Polish, and Hebrew. Her latest book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, is forthcoming in late fall 2019 from Harvard University Press. Magda Teter’s work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (in 2007 and 2012), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, she was a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, in 2007-2008, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University. In 2017-2018 she was the Mellon Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2012-2016, she served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and in 2015-2017 as the Vice-President for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies.

Łukasz Krzyżanowski received a PhD in the Social Sciences from the University of Warsaw in 2015. From 2016 to 2018, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin (Dahlem research School POINT Fellow). He was also an Assistant Professor in the Historical Institute at the University of Warsaw. Krzyzanowski received a number of scholarships, including those from the Faculty of History University of Oxford, Yad Vashem and the Claims Conference (Saul Kagan Fellowship). His award-winning monograph about the return of Jewish survivors to the town of Radom in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust was published in 2016 under the title: Dom, którego nie było. Powroty ocalałych do powojennego miasta (second ed. 2018). The Yad Vashem Publications Committee has recently accepted the book for publication in Hebrew. The English-language adaptation will be published in 2020 by Harvard University Press. From September 2018, Lukasz Krzyzanowski has served as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His current focus of research is everyday life and social order in the small towns and villages of central Poland under German occupation and in the early postwar period.

Anna Cichopek-Gajraj is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. Her fields of expertise include modern history of Polish/Jewish relations, antisemitism, and post-Holocaust studies in social and comparative history. Her book, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia in 1944-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) was a Finalist of the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a recipient of the 2015 Barbara Heldt Prize Honorable Mention. She is also the author of Pogrom Żydów w Krakowie 11 sierpnia 1945 (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2000). She currently works on social history of the global postwar displacement of Polish Catholics and Polish Jews in the first twenty years after World War II (1945-1965).

Gabriel Finder is Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of Jewish Studies and associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia. His various teaching and research interests include the Holocaust, Jewish rebuilding and the revival of Jewish culture in Europe in its aftermath, and Holocaust-related trials. In addition to a B.A. from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and he practiced criminal law for five years, mostly in Israel. He is coeditor with Laura Jockusch of Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2015), which was named a 2016 National Jewish Book Award finalist in the Holocaust category by the Jewish Book Council; and he is coauthor with Alexander Prusin of Justice Behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is also coeditor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming 2020), and he is completing a monograph on the postwar Jewish honor court in Poland.

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 Guggenheim Fellow. Her books include Golden Harvest with Jan T. Gross (Oxford University Press, 2012), Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (Yale University Press, 2009), and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination (University of California Press, 1995). 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.

Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently Associate Professor in the departments of History and Sociology-Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, where she also is Founding Director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL). She is the author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (2013); and co-editor of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (2016); Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015); and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011). She curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy in 2013 (with the 2014 catalog Lucky Jews), and in 2018 co-curated Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust, both at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum.

Katrin Stoll has been a Fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin since February 2019. From 2015 to 2018 she worked at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. She is a member of the research group “Early Modes of Writing the Shoah: Practices of Knowledge and Textual Practices of Jewish Survivors in Europe (1942–1965).“As a member of this group she retrieved and safeguarded the Nachman Blumental Collection at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2018 and ensured that 32 boxes containing Holocaust-related material were shipped to YIVO. Katrin is the author of Die Herstellung der Wahrheit (2012) and co-editor of several books including Personal Engagement and the Study of the Holocaust (with Noah Benninga, 2016). Her research interests include: anti-Semitism; Holocaust historiography and testimonies; Täterforschung; criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic of Germany; representations of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland.

Anna Bikont is a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, the main newspaper in Poland which she helped found in 1989. For her articles on the crimes of Jedwabne and Radzilów, she was honored in 2001 with Poland's most prestigious award in journalism, The Press Prize. In 2011 she received the European Book Prize for Le crime et le silence, the French version of The Crime and the Silence. Bikont was a Cullman Fellow of the New York Public Library.

Stanisław Krajewski, professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw, has been doing research in the field of logic and the philosophy of mathematics as well as the philosophy of religion and interfaith dialogue. One of the initiators of the Jewish revival in Poland, after 1989 he was among the founders of the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society and of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews; he has been the Jewish co-chairman of the Council since its inception. Former member of the board of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, International Council of the Auschwitz Camp Museum and Memorial. Co-author of the post-war section of the core exhibition in POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Author of many articles and books including: Jews, Judaism, Poland (Polish, 1997); The Mystery of Israel and the Mystery of the Church (Polish, 2007); Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (English; Austeria, Cracow 2005); Our Jewishness (Polish, 2010); Jews and … (Polish, 2014); What do I Owe to Interreligious Dialogue and Christianity (in English and Polish; The Judaica Foundation, Cracow 2017).

Andrew Silow-Carroll is Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Editor in Chief. Previously he served as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News and wrote an award-winning weekly column in the Times of Israel. He was also the managing editor of the Forward newspaper, editor of the Washington Jewish Week, senior editor of Moment magazine, and a reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Dr. Michael C. Steinlauf holds an M.A. in Literature from Columbia University and a doctorate in Judaic Studies from Brandeis University. He is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997), which examines how the experience of witnessing the Holocaust shaped Polish history and consciousness in the half century after World War II. He was a contributing editor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2008), responsible for entries on theater and performance, and the editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, v. 16 (2003), the first collection of studies focusing on Jewish popular culture in Poland and its contemporary afterlife. His writings have been translated into Polish, Hebrew, German and Italian. Professor Steinlauf has also been active in various kinds of Jewish memory work in Poland. He has lectured at the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival and the University of Warsaw, taught in the Musicians' Raft program organized by the Borderlands Foundation in Sejny, Poland, and served as chief historical advisor and curator of modern Jewish culture for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He is currently at work on a study of the Yiddish writer and activist Y. L. Peretz.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, (with Marwan Hisham), which was long-listed for a National Book Award. Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.  Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress and the New York Historical Society. She is currently the Spring 2019 artist in residence at NYU's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

About YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story