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, kosher vodka, 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 and where only about 10,000 Jews now live.
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. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the Vucinich Book Award, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
- Winner of the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award, The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America
Geneviève Zubrzycki is professor of sociology and faculty associate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. She is the author of The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland and Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec.
"[A] significant study that offers readers an accessible analysis of what is undoubtedly a central topic in the Jewish existence in Poland today."—Emma Zohar, Jewish Culture and History
"[A] tour de force. . . . Zubrzycki shows us that there is still much to discover in terms of the afterlife, and the actual life, of Jews and others in the former Jewish heartlands of Europe."—Dani Kranz, Contemporary Jewry
“Exploring the limits of ‘empathetic cultural appropriation’ and ‘performative solidarity’ with the erased and oppressed, Zubrzycki analyzes Poland’s ‘Jewish turn’ and in the process reveals what it means to be Polish. The most thoughtful reflection on Jewish presence in Polish consciousness to date and a brilliant contribution to the cultural sociology of traumatic histories and conflicted memories.”—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
“Illuminating the peculiar phenomenon of contemporary Polish philosemitism and its role in the symbolic struggle over national belonging, Resurrecting the Jew is rich, compelling, subtle, and deeply researched. I found the book hard to put down, both because of its fascinating content but also because it sheds so much light on other settings, including the United States, where a similar battle over national history is unfolding.”—Philip Gorski, author of American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present
“Drawing on very impressive research, Resurrecting the Jew offers sharp insights into contemporary Poland’s Jewish renaissance. Geneviève Zubrzycki takes readers on a rich and complex quest, resulting in a fascinating argument that will interest scholars in a wide range of disciplines from sociology to history to Jewish studies.”—Michael Meng, author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland
