IPJS: Book launch - The Yiddish Press in Warsaw and the Rise of National-Socialism in Germany

Anne-Christin Klotz, Gemeinsam gegen Deutschland

Źródło: Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies

  • Wednesday, 9 November 2022 18:00 – 19.00 GMT on Zoom
  • This event is co-organised with UCL's Institute of Jewish Studies

Book Launch:

‘Gemeinsam gegen Deutschland’.

The Yiddish Press in Warsaw and the Rise of National-Socialism in Germany with Dr Anne-Christin Klotz, Professor Antony Polonsky, Professor François Guesnet (chair)

The question why the press did not cry out louder against the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany has been thoroughly discussed in Western European and North American academia since the early 1960s. Until recently, research on press reactions on National Socialism and the Holocaust focused mostly on non-Jewish newspapers and magazines published in North America and Western Europe. The Jewish press of Central and Eastern Europe published mainly in Yiddish, the mother tongue of more than ten million people and a lingua franca throughout the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, was much more vocal.

The study presented today closes this research gap by examining how Jewish journalists who wrote for the Warsaw daily Yiddish press reacted to the events in Germany from Hitler’s rise to power up to the German invasion of Poland in 1939 on both an individual and a collective level as well as what happened to them in the months following the end of the Second Polish Republic. Klotz focuses on how Polish Jews acquired and disseminated subversive knowledge of the goings-on in National Socialist Germany in spite of censorship and repression in Germany and Poland alike, and also on how they initiated campaigns of protest and solidarity to the benefit of the people being persecuted.

Anne-Christin Klotz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD in Modern History from the Free University Berlin in 2021 with a thesis on the Warsaw Yiddish press and its struggle against Nazi Germany, which has recently been awarded a special distinction by the jury of the Scientific Research Award of the Polish Ambassador to Germany. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and the German Historical Institute Washington and she worked as a research assistant at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Before her studies she volunteered at the educational department at the Holocaust memorial site Stutthof (Sztutowo, Poland). For her research she was awarded numerous scholarships including the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies and by Yad Vashem. Her current work focuses on Eastern European Jewish landsmanshaftn.

François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. He specializes in Eastern European Jewish History and is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. His book publications include Polnische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, Cologne, 1998), and, as editor, Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis (2015, paperback 2017). He also co-edited the collected volume Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from Its Inception to the Present (Boston, Leiden: 2022).

Antony Polonsky, Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Programme/Polin Museum Warsaw, and Professor Emeritus, Brandeis University, is co-chair of the Editorial Board of Polin Studies in Polish Jewry and the author of numerous studies on eastern European Jewish history, including ‘The Jews in Poland and Russia’, 3 vols (2010, 2012), and ‘The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History’ (2013).

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The Institute of Jewish Studies was established in 1954 in Manchester by the late Professor Alexander Altmann to promote the academic study of all branches of Jewish culture. Since 1959 it has been an autonomous organisation within the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL.

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About the IJS: a conversation with our director, Mark Geller