Was being Jewish an important factor in choosing a specific political path? What did Polish Jews drive to join leftist organizations? Does a Jew who is a communist or anarchist cease to be a Jew? These compelling questions were raised during the conference in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN, Warsaw. Political choices, individual motivations, and personal biographies were analyzed by scholars using biographical methods.
The first panel addressed the changing legacy of certain leftist figures, paying particular attention to the role of Jewishness in these memory practices. Jakob StürmaNn (Berlin) discussed the figure of Pavel Axelrod, a Marxist revolutionary and Menshevik leader. Considering his treatment by Jewish socialists during the inter-war period, Stürmann argued that the complexities and contradictions of Axelrod's political activities were simplified by this new generation as they made him into a “hero of the past”.
This strategy was echoed by Alexandra Kemmerer (Heidelberg), who was critical of the contemporary editorial treatment of Rosa Luxemburg. She argued that the continued emphasis on Luxemburg as a historical figure is, in fact, a strategy of marginalization, amplified by her position as both a Jew and a woman. In spite of the revival of scholarly interest in Luxemburg, her contributions as a political thinker go unacknowledged.
Katarzyna Chmielewska (Warsaw) discussed the post-communist reckoning with the Polish past. Through an analysis of literature, she argued that motifs of accusation and betrayal were twofold with respect to Jewish communists. Depicted as betraying their Jewish culture to become communists then betraying Poland as communists, Chmielewska emphasized the unique – and often anti-Semitic – tropes that persist in discussing Jewish involvement in communism.
The second session combined a reflection on the transnationalism and internationalism of Jewish involvement in the left-wing movements with a microhistorical analysis of individual and group biographies. The local dimension was intertwined in contributions with the national and transnational dimensions. Zoé Grumberg (Paris) analyzed the political trajectories – life choices, social, family and gender conditions – of Jewish communists who emigrated to Paris in the 1920s and continued their political activity there, while cultivating their cultural distinctiveness.
Ebony Nilsson (Sydney), through the prism of the biography of one of the Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Australia after the war, revealed the cultural, identity and political tensions in the functioning of Jewish left-wing activists in Australian society and trade union organizations and shed light on the migration policy of Australia after World War II.
Daniel Walkowitz (New York) argued that the political choices of his family members were inspired by Bundist political culture with strong Yiddish legacy. From his perspective, Bundism served the family members as a matrix of political and social involvement in left-wing initiatives and movements, without, however, removing the conflicting claims to Jewish and left-wing identity and fundamentally different visions of radical social justice.
Session three showed various forms of left-wing activism through the prism of three Jewish biographies from Central and Eastern Europe. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska (Warsaw) discussed the Jewish reproductive agenda of the example of physician Herman Rubinraut’s activity in the interwar “conscious motherhood” movement in Poland. She raised the important issue of male gendered activism, which became a starting point for further discussion.
Andrea Feldman (Zagreb) shed some light on the social activity and left-wing involvement of Vera Erlich, a Croatian social anthropologist, in interwar Yugoslavia. She paid special attention to Erlich’s attitude to Zionism as a way to modernize Croatian Jewish communities.
Vassili Schedrin (London) presented a biography of Solomon Mikhoels, an actor, a symbol of Yiddish Soviet culture, who led the autonomous movement in the USSR. Mikolesha's attitude and political agenda was analyzed not only on the basis of archival documentation, but also the most important films in the actor's work.
In session four, questions of memory and legacy continued. Stefan Gąsiorowski (Cracow) traced the PPS threads in the biography of Michał Borwicz whose connections to the PPS enabled him to escape from the Janow camp in Lviv in 1943.
Michał Trębacz (Warsaw) spoke about the explicit language used in Szmul Zygielbojm's suicide note from 1943 that addresses a socialist future, arguing that this aspect of Zygielbojm's biography has been largely ignored, echoing similar concerns from the first session of the day.
Maria Ferenc (Warsaw) presented a biography of the little-known but important figure of Shmuel Breslaw, a leader of Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto and an advocate of armed resistance. Influenced by the founder of socialist Zionism, Ber Borochov, Breslaw's intellectual development was hastened by wartime, and although he died young, he was able to fulfill his intellectual potential and influence others.
Panel five addressed the tensions between the emancipatory ideology and political practice of left-wing movements, exploring the issue of inclusion and exclusion in the biographies of Jewish activists. Dariusz Zalega (Katowice) analyzed the negotiation of national, civic and party identity based on the biography of Zygmunt Glucksman, who was active at the intersection of the Polish and German social democratic movement in interwar Upper Silesia. He emphasized the specificity of the borderland's identity and the national indifference of the interwar social democrats, which was in conflict with the national discourse present also in these movements.
Wojciech Goslar (Cracow), in his paper on Maurycy Jeger, questioned the emancipatory assumptions of Polish social democracy in Galicia. Using a microhistorical paradigm and Gramsci's approach, which assumed focusing on groups excluded from the dominant discourse, he discussed the activity of anarchist Jeger. He posited that the assimilationism of the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia was a form of racism and exclusion.
Anna Łabadowska (Wrocław) presented Dina Blond as a representative of the post-revolutionary generation of feminist activists. On the basis of Blond’s journalism, she acknowledged that the tension between the program of women’s emancipation and the conviction of gender struggle as a derivative of class struggle overshadowed women's political involvement in the Bund. She also reflected that the official Bundist historiography silenced the activity of Bundist woman’s section, YAF (Yidisher Arbeter Froy).
In the sixth session, two scholars spoke about the activities of leftist Zionists in post-war Poland. Magdalena Semczyszyn (Szczecin) analyzed two distinct approaches taken by Zionist groups in postwar Poland, represented by Aba Kovner and Iccak Cukierman. In spite of the postwar chaos, Kovner was eager to leave Poland and begin settlement in Palestine, while Cukierman, who would later become a founder of the Dror Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, wanted to develop a Zionist social structure within his group before emigrating. Semczyszyn argued that these divergent paths could be explained by the experiences each had with communist officials during the war; Kovner became disillusioned after seeing how the USSR treated communist Jews, while Cukierman believed authorities would be sympathetic.
Anna Nedlin-Lehrer (Freiburg) continued the discussion of Cukierman and others of the founding generation of Dror Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, tracing the impact of the Dror youth movement on this group's biography, stretching from the 1930s in Poland to present-day Israel. While acknowledging that survival was a result of luck more than any actual strategy, Nedlin-Lehrer posited that participation in Dror provided its members with a crucial social and ideological structure that helped them make it through the war and later build new lives.
Returning to the inter-war period, Eryk Krasucki (Szeczecin) analyzed references to the "World of the Past" in biographical sources concerning the elite of the KPP. Using documentary materials, Krasucki acknowledged that it is difficult to determine the Jewish connection of KPP members, not least because the category of "Jewish" was fluid and imprecise, as it continues to be today.
Bringing together the broader themes of politics, Jewishness, and biography in her keynote address, Karen Auerbach revisited some of the characters she chronicled in her book, The House at Ujazdowskie 16, a microhistory of a small group of Jewish families living in Warsaw after the Holocaust. She asked, “How can historians draw on reconstructions of life paths to access frameworks of belonging to understand what binds individuals to broader social communities?” Using history of emotion as a theoretical framework for revisiting the ambiguities and contradictions in the lives of Jewish leftists in this period, Auerbach focused on belonging as a mode of citizenship and as a way to understand political decisions.
Presentations in session seven challenged the boundary between religion and socialism. In her discussion of Agudat Yisroel, Ada Gebel (Haifa) described the complex negotiations of Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Breuer and Rabbi Yehudah Leib Orlean in synthesizing socialism and Jewish orthodoxy. Distancing themselves from the non-Jewish and "secular" political movements around them but still criticizing capitalist system, they conceived of an innovative socialist discourse through frameworks of Jewish law (halakha).
Gershon Bacon (Ramat Gan) clarified some of the competing problems facing Poalei Agudat Yisrael in Interwar Poland. Echoing Gebel, he argued that the party saw the anti-clerical and anti-religious attitudes characterizing the socialist camp and the revolutionary nature of socialism as dangers to orthodox Jewish life.
Yitzchak Schwartz (New York) presented a sketch of the complex fusion of leftist ideas and religious practice in the lives of those living in Am Olam, a Jewish agricultural colony in New Jersey. Troubling terms such as "secular" "religious" and "left-wing," Schwartz argued that while Am Olam is usually depicted by historians as socialist, non-Zionist, and secular, it was often all and none of these things.
The research presented in panel eight explored the tension and the relationship between the biographies of Jewish historians and their methodological approach and historical work and discussed the problem of the entanglement and burden of history through personal experience. Piotr Laskowski (Warsaw) highlighted moments in the life of Moses Kaufman that are key to understanding his historical writings, and that have been silent in his biographical studies to date. He argued that Kaufman's writings that affirm the PPS are an indictment against betraying the idea of Polish socialism and the idea of internationalism understood as crossing the borders of one's own nationality. At the same time, Laskowski showed how Kaufman's religious imagination overlapped with the historiosophical interpretation of socialism as the realization of the Messiah promise.
By analyzing Raphael Mahler's biography and writing, Tom Navon (Haifa) examined the link between the political choices of the historian and his experience of Polish anti-Semitism in the 1930s. He argued that the combination of the history of class struggle with national history, materialism with idealism in his works on modern history of Polish Jews is a reflection of Mahler's Zionist-Marxist worldview.
Tomasz Siewierski (Warsaw) reconstructed Feliks Tych's biography and showed that historian’s Jewish identity, which he wiped out for a long time, and socialization in left-wing circles influenced the shape of Tych’s research.
Session nine on political involvement and responsibility of Jewish communists opened with Stanisław Krajewski’s (Warsaw) paper dedicated to his own Jewish ancestors and their involvement in the communist movement. He examined the circle of revolutionaries of the late 19th and early 20th century, asking questions about their Jewish identity and its significance for themselves and their comrades, for the observers and political opponents of the time and for later commentators and us present.
Katarzyna Rembacka (Szczecin) analyzed a biography of Leonard Borkowicz – an activist of the KPP and the Szczecin Voivode after the war – through the prism of choice and breakthroughs moments. She pointed out the omission of Jewishness and the lack of “expiation” and “apology” elements in Borowicz's self-narration, at the same time challenging the sense of such penitential gestures.
Katarzyna Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz and Marcin Moskalewicz (Poznan) presented an outline of the biography of Włodzimierz Brus, an ideologist of Marxism and academic lecturer, and Helena Wolińska, prosecutor of the Stalinist period, a very controversial figure in the Polish public debate. The biographers focused on the problem of pre-war experiences and social origin, the way to political engagement, as well as identity changes, visible for example in name transformations.
Scholars in session ten examined the intersection of gender and politics in the biographies of women. Emma Zohar (Berlin) analyzed the autobiographies of Bina Garncarska-Kadari and Ester Rosenthal-Schneiderman. Arguing that emotions played a major role in the political activity of these women, this approach attempted to go beyond social or economic arguments about why certain people became activists in spite of the danger of doing so.
Jan Rybak (York) extended this line of thinking in focusing on the personal account of Malke Schorr's childhood and youth. He argued that the social emancipation sought by the labor movement mirrored the self-emancipation from traditional gender roles sought by Malke Schorr.
Magdalena Grabowska (Warsaw) explored the postwar activism of Edwarda Orłowska, who sought to build a mass women's movement by engaging rural women and mainstreaming women's equality in all areas of life.
The last session addressed the problem of the generational experience of Jewish communists and touched upon the process of socialization into the communist movement. Referring to his classic work, Jaff Schatz (Lund) examined the political, economic, social and cultural determinants that pushed young people to engage in communism and the psychological mechanisms visible in the biographies of individual activists. He stressed the potential for rebellion and emancipation in this form of political activity and argued that the chance played a crucial role in choosing this or that political movement by young people.
ŁUKASZ BERTRAM (Warsaw) dealt with the experience of Polish communists of Jewish origin who entered the party-state elite between 1948 and 1956 at three stages of their socialization: the path to political engagement, activity in the interwar communist movement, and participation in exercising political power after 1945. He argued that in terms of social background one can observe the “Jewish petty bourgeois habitus” and “Polish plebeian” one as the dominant patterns. Moreover, he discussed that the political involvement of the group under study should be considered in terms of continuity with the assimilation/acculturation processes already having taken place in the family milieus, than “red assimilation” starting with access to the movement. He also put emphasis on the noticeable absence of narratives about antisemitism in most of the studied ego-documents.
The conference concluded with a roundtable on “Jewish Left-wing Activism and Family History.” Using photographs and personal family stories, the roundtable moved the discussion of biography into a personal vein. Based in part on family stories told by Janina Diamand, Ewa Herbst (Edgewater NJ, USA) spoke about Herman Diamand and the influence of the Diamand home in the Lviv movement. Leopold Sobel (Lund) explored the threads of continuity linking three generations of leftist involvement in three different countries: his father, whose activities began in 1929 and continued in postwar Poland; his own work, especially as a university student in Israel; and his son, a former Labour MP from Leeds, UK. Historian David Slucki (Charleston) shared material from his new book, Sing This at My Funeral, a memoir based on letters sent between his father in Australia and an uncle in the United States. Speaking about Zayde Yaakov, who was born in Warsaw and immigrated to Australia after WWII, the memoir serves as a lens for viewing these historical events through the lives of ordinary people who experienced them, a story that Slucki calls “both remarkable and mundane.”
Indeed, the biographical lens used by many of the presentations highlighted the oppositions discussed by Slucki. Both representative of larger phenomena and deeply personal, the figures treated by the scholars at this conference and the stories that were told highlighted complex tensions between individual, group, nation, politics, and history.
Conference overview:
Antony Polonsky (POLIN Museum, Warsaw): Welcome and Introduction
Session 1: How Jewish are Leftist Ideas? How Leftist is Jewishness?
Chair: François Guesnet (University College London)
Jakob Stürmann (Free University of Berlin): Pavel Axelrod – Eastern European Socialist and “Role Model” for Jewish Socialists during the Inter-War Period?
Alexandra Kemmerer (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law, Heidelberg/Berlin): Poland’s Forgotten Eagle: Rosa Luxemburg – Martyr, Icon, Marginalized Theorist of Revolution
Katarzyna Chmielewska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): The Family Communist Rhizome
Session 2: Internationalist Politics, Transnational Biographies, Local Activism
Chair: Dobrochna Kałwa (University of Warsaw)
Zoé Grumberg (Sciences Po, Paris): Yiddish-Speaking Jewish Communists from Poland in Paris. Social and Political Trajectories from the 1920s to the 1960s
Ebony Nilsson (University of Sydney): A ”Pied Piper of Discontent” Among Workers and a “Broken-Hearted Communist”. The Transnational Lives and Politics of Polish-Born Jewish Left-Wing Activists in Australia
Daniel Walkowitz (New York University): The Bund Milieu. The Polish-Jewish Left-Wing Diaspora, From Łódź and Białystok to Paterson, New Jersey
Session 3: Social and Cultural Activism
Chair: Artur Markowski (POLIN Museum, Warsaw)
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska (University of Warsaw): Being a Jewish Birth Controller in Interwar and State-Socialist Poland. The Story of Herman Rubinraut (Henryk Babiniak)
Andrea Feldman (University of Zagreb): Circle of Vera Erlich Stein. Jewish Activists in the Interwar Yugoslavia
Vassili Schedrin (Kingston University): Solomon Mikhoels’ Unwritten Autobiography
Session 4: Antifascism Facing the Holocaust
Chair: Stephan Stach (POLIN Museum, Warsaw)
Stefan Gąsiorowski (Jagiellonian University, Cracow): Saved by Socialism? PPS Threads in the Life of Michał Borwicz (1911–1987)
Michał Trębacz (POLIN Museum, Warsaw): Szmul Zygielbojm – Bundist in Polish London, 1942/43
Maria Ferenc (University of Warsaw / Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw): Shmuel Breslaw – Unacknowledged Intellectual Leader of Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto
Session 5: Exclusion and Inclusion in Leftist Jewish Biographies
Chair: Urszula Chowaniec (University College London)
Dariusz Zalega (Independent Scholar, (Katowice): Zygmunt Glücksman – Activist of the Jewish Left, Leader of the German Socialists in Upper Silesia
Wojciech Goslar (Foundation of Social History, Cracow): Jew, Worker, Anarchist. The Experience of Exclusion in Late Nineteenth-Century Austrian Galicia on an Example of Maurycy Jeger’s Biography
Anna Ładowska (University of Wrocław): Dina Blond as a Second-Generation Activist in Bund
Session 6: After the Holocaust Towards a Brighter Future?
Chair: Zofia Wóycicka (German Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Magdalena Semczyszyn (Institute of National Remembrance, Szczecin): Aba Kowner and Icchak Cukierman – Two Views on the Future of Zionists in Communist Poland in 1944
Anna Nedlin-Lehrer (University of Freiburg): The Founders of the Dror Kibbuz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbuz) and the Formation of Their Group Identity
Eryk Krasucki (University of Szczecin): References to the „World of the Past” in Biographical Sources Concerning the Elite of the KPP Leadership with Jewish Roots
Keynote lecture
Karen Auerbach, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill): Jewish Biographies, Leftist Politics, and the History of Emotions
Session 7: Negotiating Religion and Socialism
Chair: Yvonne Kleinmann (Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, Halle/Saale)
Gershon Bacon (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan): Orthodox Jews, Ambivalent Leftists. The Case of Poalei Agudat Yisrael in Interwar Poland
Yitzchak Schwartz (New York University): Pious Radicals? Biographical Sketches of Lived Religion Between Poland, Ukraine and New Jersey in the Am Olam Agricultural Colonies, 1881–1924
Ada Gebel (Shaanan College, Haifa): Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Breuer, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Orlean, and Karl Marx – Did All Three Follow the Same Path?
Session 8: Jewish Perspectives on the History of the Left – Marxist Approaches on Jewish History
Chair: Katarzyna Person (Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw)
Piotr Laskowski (University of Warsaw): The Monument of Failed Dreams. Mojżesz Kaufman as a Revolutionary and a Historian
Tom Navon (University of Haifa and Yad Ya’ari): Raphael Mahler – The History of Polish Jewry from a Marxist-Zionist Perspective
Tomasz Siewierski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): In the Merging World of History and Politics. Feliks Tych (1929–2015) – Scholar and Participant
Session 9: Responsibility
Chair: Dariusz Stola (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Stanisław Krajewski (University of Warsaw): How Jewish Were My Communist Ancestors? Revisiting the Question of Jewish Responsibility
Katarzyna Rembacka (Institute of National Remembrance, Szczecin): Leonard Borkowicz’s Ideological Choices and His Autobiographical Settlement with Communism
Katarzyna Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz / Marcin Moskalewicz (Agora Publishing House, Poznan University of Medical Sciences): Helena Wolińska and Włodzimierz Brus – A Political Biography
Session 10: Emancipatory Empowerment and Leftist Politics
Chair: Agnieszka Mrozik (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Emma Zohar (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin): Communism, Gender and Emotions in the Autobiographies of Bina Garncarska-Kadari and Ester Rosenthal-Schneiderman
Jan Rybak (University of York): A Revolutionary Woman’s Self-Emancipation – Malke Schorr’s Childhood and Youth in Lwów
Magdalena Grabowska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): Edwarda Orłowska – Activist, Politician, a Feminist?
Session 11: Different Generations? Different Biographies?
Chair: Krzysztof Persak (POLIN Museum, Warsaw)
Jaff Schatz (Independent Scholar, Lund): Determinants, Contingencies, Chances. The Paths to the Interwar Communist Movement
Łukasz Bertram (University of Warsaw): Youth, Underground and Power. Polish Communists of Jewish Origin and the Tensions of the Revolutionary Habitus
Round Table: Jewish Leftwing Activism and Family History
Participants: Alex Sobel (Leeds), Leopold Sobel (Lund), Ewa Herbst (Edgewater, NJ), David Slucki (Charleston, SC)
Chair: Antony Polonsky (POLIN Museum, Warsaw)