Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies (review)

Boo,? Reviews 127 Tensions between cohesive, permanentcommunal pluralism and individual equality under the law, along with the secular-religious divide in Jewish society, have prevented the establishment of a constitution and bill of rights in Israel. The legal implications of these and similar differences in the sociopolitical environments of two countries both committed to democratic development are traced by the author using, for the most part, the standard American legal method of case analysis. An example is his skillful analysis of the differential judicial protection available to speech that inflames religious or racial hatred or that offends minorities. The author's presentation is competent, but it is not easy reading. It is a book for specialists that will be most rewarding to readers who are already acquainted with Israel's political system and wish to learn more about its legal institutions and the role of the courts in the Israeli polity. Milton J. Esman Department of Government Cornell University Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies. Volume 6 (1991). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers for the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies. 342 pp. n.p.!. In the early 1980s, as one of the many byproducts of the tottering of communism in Eastern Europe, a number of Polish historians began to collaborate with their Jewish counterparts in Western Europe, Israel, and the United States to examine the history of the Jews of Poland, particularly prior to the Holocaust. At the center of this renaissance of scholarly (and, especially in Poland, also popular) interest in the Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe, the annual Polin, founded in 1986, has played a key role. Volume 6 of this publication, dedicated to the Jews of Lodz from 1820 to 1939, well illustrates the notable accomplishments as well as some inevitable weaknesses of this pioneering endeavor. With nearly a quarter of a million Jews, constituting one-third of its population, Lodz emerged in the early twentieth century not only as the second Jewish city of Poland (after Warsaw), but as the locus of unique economic, social, and cultural developments. The history of Lodz paralleled, first of all, the history of capitalism in Poland. In the course of the nineteenth century the Polish textile industry was created in Lodz largely through the endeavors of German and Jewish industrialists and 128 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 entrepreneurs employing Polish, German, and Jewish workers. The history of multi-ethnic Lodz was also therefore a microcosm of the development of modern national antagonisms in Poland, including, but not limited to, antisemitism. Jewish Lodz was a tough and brawling place, a city, we might say today, perpetually on the make: its millionaires built the biggest palaces, its working class was the best organized and most combative, its artists and poets after World War I launched the most aggressively modernist movement in Jewish Poland. Yet if today one searches for the history of Jewish Lodz, one discovers only titles in which "Lodz" and "Ghetto" are inevitably coupled. There is considerable information, in other words, on how these Jews died, but none on how they lived. The present volume is the first attempt to fill this absence. What is most useful in this volume are the contributions of the handful of authors capable of navigating both Polish and Jewish sources. This includes Robert Moses Shapiro's article on Jewish communal politics in Lodz during the interwar period;JerzyTomaszewski's additions toJacob Leshtchinsky's prewar studies of Jewish demography; Jerzy Malinowski's overview of the avant-garde painters and poets who called themselves "Young Yiddish"; and Chone Shmeruk's introduction to the neglected work of the Lodz Yiddish novelist and poet Yisroel Rabon. There is also material on Jewish cultural life in Lodz from the fascinating Yiddish memoirs of Y. Y. Trunk. Entitled Poyln, first published in seven volumes after the war, they are excerpted here in English for the first time. Most of the contributions to this volume, however, are studies based exclusively on Polish sources. In certain cases, this approach suffices, as, for example, with Wieslaw Pus's introduction to the history of Lodz, and Maria Kaminska's analysis of pre-war Polish attitudes to Jews in Lodz as expressed in recent...