“poland”

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

A gripping story by Rosa Palatnik about a girl smuggling goods over the Galician border. 

May 16, 2025

Though this film squarely fits into the growing genre of films about the return of Jews to Poland, its engine is character, not history.

Jan 13, 2025

Her Birth and Later Years and Pomiędzy światami/ Between Worlds are more than poems and essays; these books are a testament to Irena Klepfisz’s life as a survivor, a Jewish lesbian, a Yiddishist, and a political activist.

Oct 21, 2024

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

A future beyond anything Rosenfarb dared to imagine is now present, and it exists alongside the painful past. 

May 07, 2024

This collection — the intimate letters and a diary of an early twentieth century Zionist politician— was saved from oblivion by chance, found in a pile of trash in Israel. Through various intermediaries, the collection then ended up at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Apr 22, 2024

Whether or not The Zone of Interest is a good film does not hinge on the usage of a minute-long melody. But I do believe its employment tells us the film was impeccably researched by a Jewish director with a clear vision for who ought to say what, and when.

Apr 16, 2024

The POLIN Music Festival is an event dedicated to the broad spectrum of Jewish music. This year, the concert inaugurating the 6th edition of the festival took place on February 23rd at the POLIN Auditorium.

Apr 10, 2024

Weaver interviewed Julie Weitz about her ongoing Doikayt project: A series of ritualistic, improvisational performances at Jewish sites across Eastern Europe.

Apr 05, 2024

This fall, the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at Wroclaw University is opening its doors to international students who don’t know Polish thanks to its International MA Program in Eastern European Jewish Studies, taught entirely in English.

Mar 28, 2024

The creators of the 2023 album Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango grapple with complex questions about long-term trauma and the burdens of memory for women who survived the Holocaust.

Feb 23, 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

An interview with Polish poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski.

Nov 02, 2022

This essay offers the first fruits of laborious research in Grade’s papers, which were were jointly acquired by the National Library of Israel and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York in 2013.

Dec 15, 2021

Magdalena Kozłowska interviews Piotr Nazaruk about Lublin's Grodzka Gate Center and the center's new online exhibit of memory maps from yizkor bikher and oral history interviews.

Jul 06, 2020

Every two years, the town of Kutno, Poland hosts the Sholem Asch Festival, which organizers describe as an “event connecting the past with the present of Kutno, once a Polish-Jewish town in which Jews constituted over 70% of the population in the 19th century.”

Feb 04, 2020

An Extract from Yakov Leshchinsky's Di ekonomishe lage fun Yidn in Poyln.

Sep 25, 2019

The opening section of a Grade’s collection Shayn fun farloshene shtern (Shine of Extinguished Stars, 1950).

Mar 25, 2019

1931 newspaper article by the Polish Jewish historian Meir Bałaban concerning the curious Hasidic figure known as Berish Bal-tshuve

Feb 27, 2019

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was decades in the making and now tells the thousand year history of Polish Jews in the old heart of Jewish Warsaw. 

Jan 16, 2019

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

Oct 25, 2017

In his novel Ven Yash iz gekumen, Jacob Glatstein wrote a Poland both familiar and strange, and peopled it with characters based on the real-life literary figures and historians he met in the spa town of Nałęczów. 

Jan 25, 2017