Reviews

While focused on collectors in the late imperial and interwar periods—many of whom were Polish-speaking, wealthy, integrationist, and well-educated—this work reframes the significance of the culture created by Polish Jews of that time in all their linguistic, material, political, and cultural diversity.

Dec 03, 2025

Dynner frames The Light of Learning’s sweeping historical narrative with a crucial theoretical intervention. To think about interwar Polish Hasidism is also to think about the ongoing construction of modern Jewish identity, and the fraught intersections of emancipation, acculturation, assimilation, and colonization.

Oct 14, 2024

Warsaw casts a long shadow on other cities and the provinces in this account of Jewish culture throughout the Polish lands.

Dec 08, 2023

In this study of Jewish grassroots thinkers, Kenneth B. Moss offers an account of Jewish thought, culture, and choices in interwar Poland.

Apr 11, 2023

In this study of the Jewish press in Poland, Anne-Christin Klotz identifies Polish Jewry, and specifically local Yiddish writers and journalists, as central to understanding the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

Mar 21, 2023

Sarah Ellen Zarrow on language politics in Jabotinzky’s Revisionist Zionism

Oct 25, 2017