Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, volume 19 of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry (review)

This sizeable issue of Polin attempts to fill an even more sizeable gap in the scholarship on Polish-American/Jewish-American relations in the United States—and it is a very successful attempt. Editors Mieczysław B. Biskupski and Antony Polonsky present a comprehensive introduction and eighteen separate essays, arranged roughly in chronological order, which discuss different aspects of interactions between Polish and Jewish ethnic communities. The introduction provides historical context and traces the development of both communities over the decades. The essays, authored by a plethora of accomplished scholars, focus on sources of tension as well as examples of collaboration; negative stereotypes as well as efforts to change cultural images; and actions of organizations, governments, less formal groups, and individuals that impacted the level and intensity of the relationship in various time periods.

As the introduction explains and as Ewa Morawska’s excellent essay eloquently reiterates for 1880–1940, in America both communities followed models of coexistence transplanted from the old country, which included social and economic interaction but distinctly separate cultural and religious identity (“distant proximity”) (71). Morawska argues that immigration shifted the balance of power in the relationship and resulted in the increased civic security for the Jews. In the interwar period, Jewish immigrants’ and their children’s increasing social and economic success further distanced them from their Polish counterparts, who continued to view them with a mixture of admiration and resentment. However, as John Radzilowski suggests, in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the Jews and Poles still shared neighborhoods in American cities, relations between the communities were not much different than among any ethnic groups living in often rough and tough urban neighborhoods. Maja Trochimczyk further explores these complex relationships using examples of Jewish composers born in Poland, who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and who chose to redefine their ethnic identities in different ways, as American, Jewish American, or Polish Jews connected to the Polonia community.

The events impacting Jewish-Polish relations frequently took place not in America, but rather in Poland. Homeland politics shaped responses of individuals and organizations and motivated Poles and Jews to attempt to influence its directions. Perhaps the single most defining event became World War I. Biskupski skillfully demonstrates how American Polonia, moving farther to the political right, lobbied intensely for Poland’s independent statehood. At the same time, Polonia leaders saw efforts of both American Zionists and anti-Zionists to secure rights for Jewish minorities in east central Europe as actively hostile to the idea of the resurrection of Polish statehood. As Biskupski notes, “It is difficult to see how Polish-Jewish reconciliation could have been established in wartime America. . . . The American stage for the Polish-Jewish bitterness of the twentieth century was set” (95). David Engel sees a similarly defining moment in the politics of World War II, when an attempt to form a working coalition among representatives of American Jewish organizations, the Polish government-in-exile, and American Polonia to guarantee postwar protection of Poland’s Jewish minority failed due to the inability to overcome mutual distrust.

The centrality of the Holocaust and its memory for both Jews and Poles is inescapable. Two essays, by Tomasz Potworowski and Daniel Stone, comment on wartime events. The former explored a little known episode, the evacuation of about two hundred Jewish Polish citizens from Portugal to Jamaica, the result of successful cooperation between the Polish government-in-exile and the British government. The latter studied the Polish and Jewish presses in Winnipeg from 1939 to 1945, concluding that there were no serious differences then between both communities’ knowledge and interpretation of the Holocaust as the work of the common enemy, Nazi Germany. After the war, however, Holocaust memory often divided the groups. Antony Polonsky thoroughly and systematically chronicles the most...