Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction with Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to The New Books Network.

Amber Nicol (0:05)

Hello, listeners. Welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Amber Nicol, the host of the channel. And today we are going to be talking with Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal about her recent publication, Poles and Jews, A Call for Myth Reconstruction, which came out in 2024 on Academic Studies Press.

Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal is an independent researcher of Polish-Jewish relations with an extensive background in Judaic studies from Brandeis University, the Jewish Theological Seminary in Yivu. Jennifer, welcome to the channel.

Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal (0:36)

Hi, Amber.

SPEAKER_1 (0:37)

Thanks so much for having me.

Amber Nicol (0:39)

I am so excited that you are here and that we get to sit down and talk about this book. I really enjoyed reading this book, especially the thoughtful and very personal introduction to the topic that you offer readers.

Would you mind sharing a little bit about your background and what led you to this topic with listeners today?

SPEAKER_1 (0:59)

Sure.

Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal (1:00)

I was raised as a conservative Jew, and I went to summer camps and traveled to Israel. Throughout my Jewish education, one of the guiding principles was that had I been born during World War II or lived at that time, I too would have had to bear the weight of a star stitched onto my jacket. So I think my generation of American Jews really were grounded in the Holocaust as a part of our identity, as a major part of our identity. With that, I went to Brandeis and majored in Judaic studies with a concentration in Holocaust studies. So that's my background. Why I wrote this book is that I went to a Jewish summer camp, my son's Jewish summer camp. I was there for a week and befriended three Polish women. Now, when I realized that they were Catholic Poles, I was really shocked because I was thinking, why would any Catholic Polish person want to be in a Jewish summer camp? Because I was taught that all Poles were anti-Semitic. In 2005, our family took a trip to Poland and to visit our friends. They had become good friends of ours.

That trip really challenged other preconceptions that I had. One of them was, I and a lot of American Jews at that point in 2005, believed that no Jews were left in Poland. But when I got there, I was introduced to this thriving progressive Jewish community in Warsaw. The other major, okay, is it a preconception? The other part, perhaps not, but you will determine it, I suppose, listening. When I was just met my friend's father, he's about my age, and I really wanted to understand anti-Semitism in Poland.

But I didn't really discuss it with my friends, but I figured he being my age, we would be able to have this discussion. I asked him about it, and he said quite authoritatively. He said it with conviction that there was no anti-Semitism in Poland. The Poles were not anti-Semitic. The only conflict they had with the Jews was economic.

My studies told me otherwise, and so I sort of quickly said to him, well, what about the Polish death camps? And that was just one of those moments that, quite honestly, I hope I will never forget, because he quickly reminded me, Jennifer, those were Nazi death camps. Now, of course, I knew that, right?

But how quickly my brain was willing to conflate Nazis and Poles, right? And to call them Polish death camps, what is pretty problematic. And it's a problem that I'm not the only one who's had it. It's an international problem, and it's something that Poles really grapple with.

And, I mean, even Obama did that. So it's a real issue for Poles. But nonetheless, here I came back to the United States, and I had made these two mistakes, right? That I thought there weren't Jews, but there are Jews. I conflated Poles and Nazis. What am I doing? And I returned wanting to understand what else I didn't, what else I perhaps misunderstood. And also, why did my friend, why did my friend's father believe that there was no anti-Semitism? Like, what is it that he was taught? So I took a deep dive into Polish-Jewish relations, and 20 years later, I have my book.

Amber Nicol (5:59)

And it's 20 years later, but the book itself covers well over five centuries of Jewish-Polish interactions, right? So that's a lot to cover in a text, and it is a very, very hefty text. So we won't be able to talk about all of it today in the interview. But one of the things that I really appreciated about this particular text is that you walk readers through this long duree of interactions, focusing on movements that were formative in each group's development, myth-making, understanding of themselves vis-à-vis one another and their neighbors. This is of course far too much to cover here.