Description

Since the fall of Communism, Poland’s small Jewish communities have undergone a significant revival, a process occurring in tandem with non-Jewish Poles’ soul searching about their role in the Holocaust and the development of their interest in Jewish culture and Poland’s Jewish past. This interest is visible in the mushrooming of Festivals of Jewish culture throughout Poland, the renewed popularity ofklezmer music, the dramatic proliferation of Judaica bookstores and Jewish cuisine restaurants, the governmental sponsorship of “virtual shtetls,” the emergence of Jewish studies programs at multiple universities, the opening of new museums and memorials, and the public centrality of artists’ and intellectuals’ engagements with Poland’s Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations more broadly. How can we make sense of this phenomenon? What does Poland’s Jewish renaissance teach us about the politics of memory and identity formation, and the relationship betweennational identity and religion in the global age? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and interviews, Professor Zubrzycki studies various forms of Jewish-centered enterprises and practices, and analyzes the different meanings they hold for the Jewish and non-Jewish actors and institutions engaged in them. She shows how the revival of Jewish culture in Poland is part of broader process of redefinition of Polish national identity and the building of pluralism in contemporary Poland.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Polish Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies national identity and religion, collective memory and the politics of commemorations, and the role of symbols in national mythology in the Polish and Québécois contexts. Her book, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006), received the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Religion section, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies’ Orbis Best Book Prize, and the Polish Studies Association’s Best Book Award. Her most recent article, “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” won the ASA’s Clifford Geertz Award for Best Paper in the Sociology of Culture in 2011. More information on her research can be found at
http://web.me.com/gzu/Genevieve_Zubrzycki