Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival

30.06.2023 - 15.00 / Galicia Jewish Museum, ul. Dajwór 18, Kraków

Q&A with the author (EN / PL)
Geneviève Zubrzycki, led by: Jakub Nowakowski

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered.

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is a professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the award-winning author and editor of several books, including The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Her newest book, Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival analyzes the renewal of Jewish life in that country since the fall of communism and non-Jewish Poles’ fascination with Jewish culture.