For years, the history of Polish Jews written in Poland has been told through the prism of non-Jewish documents. Researchers mainly used sources in the languages they knew, so when they reached for Jewish newspapers, it was only those that were not published in Jewish languages. Under such conditions, the subject of the research did not speak in his own voice. In Western or Israeli historiography, by contrast, most researchers used only Jewish sources or the few non-Jewish documents that were available in the West. Many of them had a hard time understanding certain phenomena and processes, as the Eastern European context remained unknown to them. Although this predicament has evolved over the years, many works on Eastern European Jewry are still written based on an incomplete or misused corpus of sources or ignoring substantial parts of the relevant literature. Anne-Christin Klotz’s recent book on the Warsaw Jewish press and how it reported on the rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1930s, however, shows that this trend is on the wane.

Arguably, one should not start a review with an assessment of the source base without first scrutinizing the conceptual approach of the work, its theses, and research results. In this case, however, it seems that the proficient use of various types of source materials is key to the book’s thoughtful structure and methodological rigor. In addition to the primary research on selected Yiddish newspapers (“Haynt”, “Der Moment”, “Naye Folkstsaytung”, “Dos Yudishe Togblat”), Klotz draws on Polish, German, Israeli, and American archives. Not only does she move freely among the most relevant literature on the issues at hand, but she masterfully arranges the information gleaned from it into a coherent whole. Her book is based on a Ph.D. dissertation defended at Freie Universität Berlin in 2020.

After outlining the situation of Jews in Poland in the 1930s, Klotz convincingly explains the selection of press titles she chose for her analysis, which represent a wide range of political perspectives and were the most popular papers among Jewish readers at the time. The only open question remains: How was the news available in the Warsaw press transmitted to other parts of Poland? The perception of press information remains difficult to analyze, and Klotz does not make a convincing attempt to do so.

In the second and third chapters, Klotz broadly introduces readers to the creators of the information themselves—Warsaw journalists, publishers, and correspondents of the Jewish press from Germany. The question of the sources of information is extremely important for assessing their reliability, but also in terms of the importance attached to the situation in Germany by the Warsaw Jewish press. The constant presence of news from the Reich, as well as the determination with which this information was obtained, demonstrate unequivocally that this news was considered essential for understanding the changes taking place in Europe at the time.

In the following chapters, Klotz meticulously analyzes how events in Germany, such as Hitler’s rise to power or the November pogrom, were reported in various newspaper titles. She gives us insight into not only the factual information readers were supposed to be familiar with, but also how new information was contextualized and what conclusions were drawn from it. The description of the experiences by Jewish journalists who visited the Third Reich is remarkable, including the train trip itself, the encounter with German Jews and Germans, and the omnipresence of uniforms and Nazi flags. Klotz shows vividly how Jewish journalists did not limit themselves to issues concerning the Jews themselves, but also looked at German society more broadly. When some of them returned to Germany after the Nazi takeover, they noticed changes not only in the appearance of the streets but also, more importantly, in the behavior of the people. Nazi Germany had become an exotic, unfamiliar place for them. One of the more noteworthy parts of the book is devoted to the response of Jewish journalists to the first information about the persecution of Jews in Germany. The reliable and insightful analyses published by the Warsaw press at the time were made possible by the work of people who either lived in Germany (mainly in Berlin) or had been following the situation on the ground for a long time.

The sixth chapter leans into the phenomenon of social and even political involvement of Jewish journalists. The growing political polarization in Poland and, above all, the persecution of German Jews and the violence they faced, led many of them to participate in and or even co-create protest movements. Focusing on the example of the movement to boycott Germany and German products, Klotz writes extensively about what this campaign looked like and how it evolved. At this point, she departs considerably from the main subject of her study. However, this does not come at the expense of the narrative, which remains centered around the book’s thematic axis.

At first glance, Anne-Christin Klotz has taken on a topic that may seem very narrow as she analyzes how the Warsaw Yiddish press reported on Germany and Nazism during the 1930s. But it would be a mistake to consider this merely a footnote to the history of Polish Jews because of its temporal, geographical, and thematic limitations. Klotz’s work is not restricted to an analysis of the press discourse, presenting what, when, how, and where was written about Nazi Germany. The scope of the book is much broader in two regards.

First, it assumes that to understand the content, it is necessary to understand how the content was produced. Klotz treats this issue very thoroughly and writes about the conditions of the Jewish press, the economic situation of newspapers, the workings of Polish censorship, and the latter’s influence on the way topics were presented by Jewish journalists. In this context, Klotz emphasizes the substantial influence of Polish press censorship on the financial situation of the newspapers, which made financial losses inflicted by censorship fines a major cause of self-censorship. Describing the economic and political crisis of the second half of the 1930s, she shows how the rise of anti-Semitism in the Polish Second Republic affected newspaper writers, who had daily experiences of violence and discrimination.

Second, Klotz devotes much attention to the authors of the articles, many of whom were also committed social activists or Jewish party politicians. She is clearly interested in how these journalists’ social, political, cultural, and economic views influenced their analyses and assessments. At the same time, she is aware that their story does not end with the appearance of some of their texts in print. That is why Klotz does not restrict herself to exploring their journalism but focuses so strongly on their social involvement and the effects of committed writing. In doing so, she succeeds in showing the intimate connection between their activities in Jewish society and their words printed in newspapers. While Klotz sheds light on the milieu of Jewish journalists and social activists, she slightly overstates the exceptionality of the activities of people such as Wiktor Alter or Mark Turków. It is worth mentioning here that the situation was quite similar among Polish journalists of the time, many of whom were aware of the social mission they performed and successfully combined the roles of journalists and activists.

Klotz’s attempt to address the problem so broadly contributes to the book’s digressivity. The desire to include so many topics leads some parts of the study to lose the main theme of the work and creates in the reader the impression that she let the sources lead the narrative. Each time there are extremely interesting plots, but they should not make up such a large part of the book.

One of the aspects highlighted by Klotz is the remarkable degree of cooperation between representatives of different newspaper titles, despite their political differences. However, it seems unjustified to conclude that the rise of Nazism led to substantial declines in the polarization of Polish Jewish society. Of course, the examples presented by Klotz show that cooperation did occur, but at the same time, one could easily give examples supporting the opposite thesis. Moreover, we should keep in mind that political disputes often continued to prevent cooperation between Zionists and Bundists, and between Communists and revisionists, even in the face of much more immediate danger—during the ongoing mass extermination of Polish Jews. It is important to show that all-Jewish cooperation was possible, but it is necessary to remember that this was not the rule. Cooperation concerned specific individuals and circles that united around specific problems.

Klotz’s book places itself at the crossroads of several important fields of inquiry. While it takes up the issue of the perception of Nazism before the Holocaust, it also provides essential knowledge for interpreting the situation of Jews under German occupation. Her findings debunk the common belief that Eastern European Jews saw the Wehrmacht soldiers entering in September 1939 as the same occupiers they had encountered after 1914. The persecution of Jews in Germany and the radical anti-Semitism of the Nazis were no secret to many. It was impossible to forget, all the more so because it was very “fresh” knowledge.