User:Icewhiz/sandbox

While the images draw upon traditional antisemitic caricature of Jewish moneylender, opinions vary on the modern images, and range from harmless folklore or nostalgia that is perhaps bizarre to offensive or antisemitic.

EHESS

Analysis

• [1] [2] - Article by Valentin Behr on Entre histoire et propagande. Les contributions de l’Institut polonais de la mémoire nationale à la mise en récit de la Seconde Guerre mondiale - final page to EHESS event.
• The Subtext of a Recent International Scandal, 17 April 2019, by Izabela Wagner (PhD EHESS-Paris) is associate professor in the department of Philosophy and Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw. She is also an associated researcher at IDHES-Paris.).

  part2: How Media, Political and Religious Elites Shape Plebian Resistance.

  part3: Forming a New Polish Political Consciousness

• The War Between Polish Nationalism and Holocaust History, 12 April 2019 in Tablet by Jonathan Brent - very long intro/background coverage followed by a extensive interview with Elżbieta Janicka.
• Ein solches Geschichtsbild dulden wir nicht – eine polnische Kampagne gegen die Holocaust-Forschung, 28 March 2019, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Joseph Croitoru (dewiki).
• Les historiens face au révisionnisme polonais, 5 April 2019 in laviedesidees.fr by Judith Lyon-Caen (co-organizer of the confernece, academic in field - [3])
• L’extrême droite polonaise perturbe un colloque sur la Shoah, in Libération by Jean-Charles Szurek
• Un colloque international à Paris sur la Shoah perturbé par des militants polonais, 26 Feburary 2019, Political - in-depth from day after the attack - detailed testimony by multiple participants.

News orgs

NEWSORG on events (threats, disruption, French government condemnation, "how to spot a Jew" front pager):

• From New Technology to Resurgent Nationalism: The Future of Holocaust Studies, Haaretz, 2 May 2019 - retrospective analysis. "Polish denial spread its reach to France this past winter. Even before the opening of the academic conference on Polish Holocaust research, agitators attempted to intimidate participants and organizers, with emails demanding its cancellation. Some of them, Polish speakers themselves, actually stalked the visiting academics, confronting them in the streets of Paris with cries of “Dirty Jew” or “Jewish ulcer,” according to a report by Izabela Wagner in the online journal Public Seminar. “Some of these insults, such as ‘Parch’ (dirty, or ‘shitty,’ Jew),” explained Wagner, “were directly borrowed from the repertoire of the interwar anti-Semitic ‘classics.’”. ... "Even for scholars who aren’t working in states like Poland, where there are organized attempts to repress their intellectual freedom (these also include Lithuania and Hungary), anyone working in the field is going to be affected by the growing global tide of nationalism, racism and a widespread attempt to undermine the very concept of factual truth."
• Front page in Polish paper: 'How to spot a Jew', The Washington Post, 14 March 2019.
• Polish newspaper runs front page list on ‘how to spot a Jew’, Independent, 14 March 2019 - "The article was printed alongside a headline reading “Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris”, a reference to a Holocaust studies conference last month whose speakers were accused of being anti-Polish..
• La Pologne minimise les incidents lors d’un colloque sur la Shoah à Paris, Le Monde, 4 March 2019
• Un colloque sur l’histoire de la Shoah perturbé par des nationalistes polonais, Le Monde, 1 March 2019.
• Colloque sur la Shoah à Paris: la France proteste auprès de la Pologne, Le Figaro, 1 March 2019.
• A l'EHESS, un colloque sur l'histoire de la Pologne perturbé par des nationalistes, 25 Feburary, at France Culture.
• POLISH HOLOCAUST RESEARCHERS ATTACKED AT PARIS SHOAH RESEARCH CONFERENCE, JPost, 25 Feburary 2019
• Right-wing groups in Poland say Holocaust conference anti-Polish, Times of Israel, 18 Feburary 2019

Other

• [4] - conference program for La nouvelle école polonaise d’histoire de la Shoah. Has a bunch of links to subsequent coverage / condemnations.
• IHRA stmt.

Bizarre

From Polish Media Issues :

"We announce that:

• every Pole who is mentioned by name and surname, who cannot defend himself against false accusations, or because the accusations were only made after his death, or because as a victim of the Holocaust and five decades of Soviet communist slavery they have no independent financial means of defense, and
• every Polish organization subjected to similar defamations

will receive support through the emerging international foundation which, with the consent of the Trade Union “Solidarity”, we would like to call the Polish Foundation of Solidarity with the Victims of Hitler’s Germany and Soviet Russia. "

Other

• "An important exception in official treatment of the National Radical legacy has been the recognition of the role of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Sily Zbrojne, NSZ) as a group of heroic anti-communist free fighters, especially by the Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamieci Narodowj, IPN). This important state institution, charged with historical commeration issues, has organzied numerous exhibitions and conferences as well as published books and articles in honour of the NSZ. For example, in 2008 the IPN advertised and promoted a music compilation CD in tribute to the NSZ featuring, among others, various skinhead nationalist bands. Not surprisingly, this tendency to rehabilitate and reward the NSZ has provoked criticism from various corners. Thus, Marek Edelman states: "to commemorate the NSZ with plaques after 50 years today is to commemorate a fascist organization". The Populist Radical Right in Poland: The Patriots, Rafal Pankowski, Routledge, pages 38-39

• "One of the drivers of the digitalization of Polish public diplomacy is a desire to manage Poland’s historic image. Already in 2015, Polish embassies and the Polish MFA had dedicated substantial digital resources to altering the perception of Poland’s role in Nazi atrocities during World War II. Managing Poland’s historic image is achieved by monitoring articles in the press pertaining to World War II and correcting journalists who mislabel “Nazi death camps” as “Polish death camps.” ... In 2012, the Polish MFA invested additional resources in managing Poland’s historical image by launching a dedicated Twitter account named “Truth About Camps”, which is part of an ongoing campaign “aimed against false statements regarding Poland’s alleged responsibility for the Holocaust.” from: Manor, I. (2019). On Selfie Diplomacy. The Digitalization of Public Diplomacy, 257–287. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04405-3_8 

• French Education minister Frédérique Vidal expresses her regret for the role of the IPN in "serious disturbances" to an academic conference on the Holocaust in Paris, which included antisemitic remarks. La Pologne minimise les incidents lors d’un colloque sur la Shoah à Paris, Le Monde, 4 March 2019

• "“Confrontational-national” view s are promoted and reinforced above all by decision-makers (not all of whom are historians) at the IPN and by its politics-oriented educational strategy" Traba, Robert. "Two Dimensions of History: An Opening Sketch." Teksty Drugie 1 (2016): 36-81.

• "After 2015 the IPN converted into an institution promoting revisionism in reference to Polish-Jewish relations. Previously open attitudes to research and teaching about the Holocaust were amended.Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Jolanta. "The uses and the abuses of education about the Holocaust in Poland after 1989." Holocaust Studies (2019): 1-22.
• "There is a danger that teaching about the rescuers, a neglected topic in education about the Holocaust until almost 1989 and later often manipulated according to the principles of the politics of history propagated by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), may give the impression that favorable attitudes towards helping Jews during WWII were common and widespread among Poles under the occupationAmbrosewicz-Jacobs, Jolanta. "The uses and the abuses of education about the Holocaust in Poland after 1989." Holocaust Studies (2019): 1-22.

• Poland’s Historical Revisionism Is Pushing It Into Moscow’s Arms, Foreign Policy, 12 Feb 2019, Mateusz Mazzini

• Yet, this might also be a comfortable excuse to avoid recognizing that many IPN researchers are more interested in the history of the communist security apparatus than in everyday life. Besides, some might feel very comfortable with the totalitarian paradigm and the schematic opposition between state and society, as their political views are closer to the right-wing camp. The so-called ‘militant historians’ identified by Georges Mink (such as Janusz Kurtyka, Jan Żaryn, Sławomir Cenckiewicz, and Piotr Gontarczyk) do not hide their sympathies for conservative or nationalist interpretations of the past (Mink, 2013). from Behr, V. (2016). Historical policy-making in post-1989 Poland: a sociological approach to the narratives of communism. European Politics and Society, 18(1), 81–95. doi:10.1080/23745118.2016.1269447 

• With time, the activities of the IPN became quite controversial, as its investigations targeted not only former nomenklatura officials but also produced leaked lists of supposed collaborators, and accusations of cooperation with the secret police by prominent opposition and religious figures – even reaching Lech Walesa (Cenckiewicz and Gontarczyk). from Bielasiak, J. (2010). The paradox of Solidarity’s legacy: contested values in Poland’s transitional politics. Nationalities Papers, 38(1), 41–58. doi:10.1080/00905990903394482

• From: Hankivsky, Olena, and Rita Kaur Dhamoon. "Which genocide matters the most? An intersectionality analysis of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights." Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 46.4 (2013): 899-920.:

  "Thus, in this case, the CPC argues that if a mass atrocities section is to be established in the museum, then a central focus should be on the injury caused to Poles and other Eastern Europeans by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia"

• From: Polec, Patryk. "From Hurrah Revolutionaries to Polish Patriots: The Rise of Polish Canadian Radicalism, 1918-1939." Polish American Studies 68.2 (2011): 43-66.

"During the Cold War, this strategy reinforced the stereotype—Polak-anty-komunista—that Poles, by nature, have always been anti-communists. The Canadian-Polish Congress, a conservative umbrella organization that zealously denounced the Polish People's Republic (PRL), played an integral role in this process by subsiding many historical mono graphs and research projects on the Canadian Polonia.8"

• From : Levin, Laura, Belarie Zatzman, and Joel Greenberg. "Studio 180’s Political Engagements: Finding the Jewish Soul in Canadian Theatre." Canadian Theatre Review 153 (2013): 50-55.

Similarly, with Our Class—which includes Catholic and Jewish Polish characters—the Canadian Polish Congress started writing letters of protest to the arts councils, saying we had rewritten history. I also got an e-mail from somebody saying information was wrong in the play. This person wanted to see all our educational materials and expected us to put her handout into the program—which of course we weren’t going to do.

BELARIE: This handout would correct the number of Poles that were involved in the massacre of Jews that takes place in the play—

JOEL: —and dispute that they were involved at all, and include the number of incidences of Jews killing Poles. They suggested there was misinformation about the pogroms, particularly events like the Kielce massacre, which have been widely acknowledged—

BELARIE: —as well-recorded, documented historical events.

JOEL: I immediately contacted this wonderful professor at University of Toronto who I had met while doing research— Piotr Wróbel, Chair of Polish Studies—and the publisher from a Polish daily paper. They both wrote back and said that this group is aggressively right-wing and will not stop. The professor suggested writing one brief note, “Thank you for your interest, but no.” There was no real demonstration at the opening, just a stack of flyers sitting on the front step of the Berkeley Street Theatre one morning with a stone on top of it. For about five consecutive days, these flyers would appear, so somebody had the time to deliver them but not the commitment to actually demonstrate.

From Weizman, Yechiel. "Unsettled possession: the question of ownership of Jewish sites in Poland after the Holocaust from a local perspective." Jewish Culture and History 18.1 (2017): 34-53.:

1. "Although the decrees regarding the status of abandoned and allegedly ownerless property confiscated by the Germans, published in the beginning of 1945, did not mention Jewish property as a distinct category, Poles and Jews alike clearly understood that one of their primary goals was to prevent Jewish property from returning to Jewish hands.19" Under the emerging category of ‘abandoned property’ (mienie opuszczone) fell all assets belonging to Polish citizens and organisations that had been confiscated during the war by the German occupiers, and others properties whose owners were absent for different reasons. According to the new legalization, those properties, as well as properties belonging to German citizens and institutions, were to be automatically nationalized.20 The fact that in occupied Poland only Jewish property as such was officially confiscated by the Germans, along with the unprecedented extermination rate of Polish Jews, suggested that ‘abandoned property’ was in many ways tantamount to ‘Jewish property.’21
2. "The severe limitations placed on the possibility of reclaiming private property only further emphasized the extent to which the new legislation affected the status of Jewish property. In contrast to the pre-war law that allowed second-degree relatives the right to claim property, under the new, postwar regulations only the original owners or direct heirs could ask for restitution.22 In light the scale of the destruction of Polish Jewry, regaining Jewish family assets was to become an almost impossible task. Jewish leaders understood this problem very well and led the protests against the new legislation.23 Polish officials did not try to conceal that the change in the inheritance laws were aimed mainly at preventing the restitution of Jewish property.24 As the then Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs explained of the new legalization in October 1945: ‘We will not permit some foreign Jews, for instance Argentinian Jews, to inherit property in Poland.’25 In internal discussions regarding the formulation of the new laws, some of the participants argued that their purpose was to prevent the concentration of too much wealth in the hand of ‘unproductive and parasite factors’ and to preclude the inheritance of property by ‘distant relatives in Argentina who engage in despicable jobs.’26"

• "Different versions of the canon had developed, including those tinted by overt antisemitic tropes of ‘ungrateful Jew’ in the postwar period".Michlic, Joanna Beata. "‘At the Crossroads’: Jedwabne and Polish Historiography of the Holocaust." Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31.3 (2017): 296-306.
• footnote 85: For recent mild and strong expressions of this myth see, for example, Mark Paul, ed., Wartime Rescuers of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors (Toronto: Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 2007); interview with Anna Poray-Wybranowska, “Nation of Heroes,” Nasz Dziennik, October 9, 2004, and the internet site of the Institute for National Memory dedicated to rescuers: www.zyciezazycie.pl. Context - As with the case of other dominant narratives pertaining to the memory of the Holocaust, some of the chief narratives about rescuers and Jewish survivors were formed in the early postwar period such as the myth of the “ignoble ungrateful Jew.” By the late 1960s, this myth was fully developed and utilized by the “partisan” faction within the Communist Party, led by General Mieczysław Moczar. Writers, journalists, and historians continued to disseminate the myth of “the ungrateful Jew” in publications in the 1970s and 1980s,84 and the myth has persisted in popular historical consciousness in the post-communist era.85 Michlic, J. (2011). “I will never forget what you did for me during the war”: Rescuer — rescuee relationships in the light of postwar correspondence in Poland, 1945–1949. Yad Vashem Studies, 39(2), 169-207.

• Lithuania’s Museum of Holocaust Denial, Tablet - "Since 1997, the Genocide Museum has been under the auspices of a state-financed institute with close ties to the highest echelons of power, called the “Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania” or, for short, “the Genocide Center.” For years its website carried a page on the “two genocides” that included this gem of Holocaust Envy: “One may cut off all four of a person’s limbs ..." For many years, one of its “chief specialists” was also a leader of the neo-Nazis in Lithuania. Recently, a bold Californian-born Lithuanian scholar who settled in his ancestral homeland years ago, Prof. Andrius Kulikauskas, has boldly taken on its leadership, which frequently defends the ethnic cleansing policies of various purported national heroes."
• Double Genocide, Slate - " An academic paper published on the Genocide and Resistance Research Center’s website went even further than Burauskaite or the court, questioning whether the Holocaust meets the standard for genocide since “although an impressive percentage of the Jews were killed by the Nazis, their ethnic group survived” and later flourished.".
• Where the Genocide Museum Is (Mostly) Mum on the Fate of Jews, NYT
• R. S. Frey (Ed.),Pettai, E.-C. (2016). Prosecuting Soviet genocide: comparing the politics of criminal justice in the Baltic states. European Politics and Society, 18(1), 52–65. - "In this sense, the Lithuanian GRRCL was the exact opposite, as it emerged after 1997 as an actor whose main purpose was to advance a specific narrative of the Communist past in society that pivoted around the notion of collective victimization. Over the past two decades the GRRCL has been much involved in public controversies, both with regard to the dual legacy of totalitarian (Nazi and Soviet) rule in Lithuania as well to the legacy of the anti-Soviet partisan ‘warfare’. In both instances, the Centre took a rather nationalist stance, eager to create an exclusive mnemonic narrative of ‘suffering and heroism’ that leaves little room for critical voices or alternative stories (Budryte, 2004 Budryte, D. (2004). ‘We call it genocide’: Soviet deportations and repressions in the memory of Lithuanians.)"
• LITHUANIA AND THE REWRITING OF HISTORY, JPost, Efraim Zuroff.
• Muddling the Holocaust in Lithuania - Steven F. Lawson - "In promoting a kind of holocaust equality, the Lithuanian government financed an “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” and established a “Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania” in its capital, Vilnius. The problem is not in vindicating the historical suffering of diverse victims of tyranny, but in using this anti-Soviet sentiment to minimize Lithuania’s enormous complicity in the destruction of its wartime Jewish population. This is no attempt by the government to engage in the shameful, anti-Semitic practice of Holocaust Denial, as practiced by the Iranian government, but to confuse the issue in such a way that diminishes sympathy and support for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The disreputable cause of Holocaust Denial has been replaced by what one scholar, a professor at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, calls “Holocaust Obfuscation.” The term has been gaining traction since the Economist published a piece on the subject last August, “Lithuania must stop blaming the Victims.”"
• Prosecution and persecution, Economist
• In Other Words: Baltic Ghosts, Foriegn Policy.
• Wulf, Meike. "Changing memory regimes in a new Europe." East European Memory Studies 7 (2011): 15-20. - " A rather outstanding case of post-communist justice is the ongoing investigation by a prosecutor of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (GRRCL) against Jewish anti-German partisans on suspicion of possible crimes against humanity committed against the Lithuanian village of Koniuchy in which thirty-eight villages were killed. Here the historic act of partisanship is employed to endorse the potent Judeo Bolshevik myth and to support the strategies of whitewashing and externalization of guilt to legitimise the local collaboration with the German occupiers.1"
• Pettai, Eva-Clarita. "Negotiating history for reconciliation: a comparative evaluation of the Baltic presidential commissions." Europe-Asia Studies 67.7 (2015): 1079-1101. - ". Some claim that accusations were first voiced by researchers of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, a strong proponent of the Lithuanian genocide thesis and self-perceived ‘guardian of [Lithuanian] memory’ "
• Katz, Dovid. "The Extraordinary Recent History of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania." Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 31.3 (2017): 285-295. "publications in the nationalist spirit emanating from the Genocide Research Center and other agencies."
• [5]
• Katz, Dovid. "On three definitions: Genocide, Holocaust denial, Holocaust obfuscation." A litmus test case of modernity: Examining modern sensibilities and the public domain in the Baltic States at the turn of the century (2009): 259-277. "Its signposting, provided by the Genocide Research Centre, also contains blatantly antisemitic material. In all these cases, the Holocaust is barely mentioned or not mentioned all; there is a condemnation of survivors who resisted, and an application of the word ‘genocide’ primarily or exclusively for Soviet crimes."
• Bizeul, Yves. "Rekonstruktion des Nationalmythos?." Frankreich, Deutschland und die Ukraine im Vergleich. Göttingen (2013). - "the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Center, which, on the behalf of the Lithuanian government pursues a very similar policy of self-victimization and glorification of far-right nationalists.51 "
• The Holocaust in Lithuania, and Its Obfuscation, in Lithuanian Sources, by Yitzhak Arad - "Nationalist and neo-Nazi elements in Lithuania, among them the Genocide and Resistance Center whose activity is funded by the government, and the “international commission” as a state institution, embarked upon activities whose purpose was to rewrite the history of the Second World War and the ensuing years."
• Wnuk, Rafał, and Piotr M. Majewski. "Between Heroization and Martyrology: The Second World War in Selected Museums in Central and Eastern Europe." The Polish Review 60.4 (2015): 3-30. - "To engage in a discussion over such an approach, it is necessary to recall the facts that are absent from the exhibition or only discreetly signaled .... nothing about the German occupation ... not find out about the pogroms against the Jewish population ... the Holocaust is only mentioned, and the captions are silent about the role the Lithuanian collaborationist units played in it. Neither will we find references to the fact that certain Lithuanian groups collaborated with the Nazis ... Finally, the exhibition fails to mention Paneriai—the site of the massacre of Vilnius Jews and execution of a few thousand Poles, thus ignoring the role of the “Paneriai riflemen”—that is, the Lithuanian Sonderkommando SD (Ypatingasis būrys), whose members carried out the executions" ... "This ethnocentric perspective leaves no place for Jews, Roma, or Belarussians— that is, the groups that suffered losses incomparably greater than those of the Lithuanians during the German occupation" .... "The exhibition clearly indicates that its creators regard ethnic Lithuanians as the only rightful inhabitants of Lithuania—the criterion of ethnicity is superior to that of citizenship."
• Washington Author Launches Petition to Stop This Year’s Neo-Nazi March in Lithuanian Capital - "Since 2008, an annual March 11th neo-Nazi march has been held with legal permits from the government ... Last year, marchers included a member of parliament and an official from the state-sponsored “Genocide Center” who has made numerous anti-Semitic slurs.".