Includes Insights into Jewish Endek-Mirror-Image Attitudes; the Bund; Jews Fleeing the USSR for Poland, and the POLIN Museum
Like other volumes of the POLIN series, this one is often a mile wide and an inch deep. It does, however, contain some interesting information, which I now bring to the reader’s attention.
“UNDERSTANDING THE SOUL”: ENDEKS HAVE BEEN BERATED FOR POSITIONS ALSO HELD BY RESPECTABLE JEWS
Traditionalist Poles have often, in Jewish publications, been portrayed as a primitive people for suggesting that even Polonized Jews should not be writing about Polish history, or Polish Catholicism, as they are incapable of understanding the Polish soul. Perhaps this matter touches on what nowadays is called cultural misappropriation. Although they are never ever condemned for it, Jews felt exactly the same way about Poles! Author Rachel Manekin, writing about Isaac Bernfeld [a Galician Jew who was the active in 1881 and who was the brother of a historian of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment)], comments, “Bernfeld conceded that there were indeed Polish authors like Tadeusz Czacki who had written about the Jews, but he doubted the ability of Christians ‘who know nothing about Jewish life, to gaze inward into the national spirit that flutters within us, and which is the inner spirit that animates people’s histories.’ The Christians were mere spectators and thus were unable to see the full picture.” (pp. 77-78).
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“UNDERSTANDING THE SOUL”: ENDEKS HAVE BEEN BERATED FOR POSITIONS ALSO HELD BY RESPECTABLE JEWS
Traditionalist Poles have often, in Jewish publications, been portrayed as a primitive people for suggesting that even Polonized Jews should not be writing about Polish history, or Polish Catholicism, as they are incapable of understanding the Polish soul. Perhaps this matter touches on what nowadays is called cultural misappropriation. Although they are never ever condemned for it, Jews felt exactly the same way about Poles! Author Rachel Manekin, writing about Isaac Bernfeld [a Galician Jew who was the active in 1881 and who was the brother of a historian of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment)], comments, “Bernfeld conceded that there were indeed Polish authors like Tadeusz Czacki who had written about the Jews, but he doubted the ability of Christians ‘who know nothing about Jewish life, to gaze inward into the national spirit that flutters within us, and which is the inner spirit that animates people’s histories.’ The Christians were mere spectators and thus were unable to see the full picture.” (pp. 77-78).
