Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Polish-Jewish Relations in North America. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 19, by Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski and Antony Polonsky (eds.) 2007

For Well Over a Century, Jewish Influence Has Been Instilling Negative Images of Poles in the American Public Mind. Common Polonophobic Holocaust-Related Memes Repudiated

I focus on several items of lasting interest:

JEWS IN JOURNALISM AND EDUCATION: SHAPING AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION, AGAINST POLES, FOR NEARLY A CENTURY AND A HALF

Anti-Polonism is very old. Jonathan Krasner notes: “American Jewish textbook writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century took a dim view of Poles and other east European peoples.” (p. 231).

NO POLISH COMPLICITY IN THE HOLOCAUST...BUT THE POLONOPHOBIC FALSEHOODS GO ON AND ON, AND ON AND ON

Jewish scholar Dr. Robert Cherry repudiates common Polonophobic notions: “Unlike many other occupied countries, Polish police and paramilitary organizations were not involved in rounding up Jews to be placed in ghettos or on trains headed for extermination camps. Catholic Poles were virtually never guards at concentration or labour camps. Thus, the idea the Poles were active accomplices in the destruction of Polish Jewry is unfounded.” (p. 340).

No kidding! But why do such basic facts even have to be articulated? And far too many Jews do not want to know these basic facts, because they want to hang on to their anti-Polish prejudices. We also still keep on hearing about “Polish death camps”. And even when the falsehoods are admitted as such, they are quickly replaced by new ones (e. g, “OK, so the Holocaust was not the Poles’ fault. But the Poles were mighty happy that Hitler did the dirty work for them.” Another baseless and scurrilous accusation.)

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY PROMOTED

Catholic priest John T. Pawlikowski continues his insistence that the term Holocaust be reserved exclusively for Jews, which, he images, doesn’t slight Polish sufferings. (p. 424). Whom is he kidding? A nation identifies what it esteems through special naming and atypical attention. How can the inordinate attention paid to the Jewish genocide, to which a special name is devoted (Holocaust or Shoah), possibly fail to convey the notion that it is supreme, and that all other genocides are second-rate? In fact, the marginalization of non-Jewish genocides is a “second wounding” of these peoples. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/victimhood-competition-jews-beat-ukes-govier/

JEWISH ATHEISM: POLISH CARDINAL AUGUST HLOND WAS RIGHT

Ironic to Polish Cardinal August Hlond’s much-maligned 1936 statement about Jews being freethinkers, Stephen J. Whitfield says much the same: “Peculiarly an ethnic as well as religious minority, Jews are ‘a certain people’. But many are far from certain about the validity of their own faith and are hardly animated by ancient verities and biblical certitudes. They have felt safer when the wall [of separation of church and state in the US] is high.” (p. 294).

1939 ZYDOKOMUNA: JEWISH DISLOYALTY TO POLAND

Marek Wierzbicki analyses the early-WWII Zydokomuna in Wilno (Vilnius), citing many Polish and Jewish eyewitnesses, and refutes the contention that it was marginal: “It was not only the communist Jews and their sympathizers who greeted the Red Army enthusiastically, but also members of Jewish organizations without any communist connections, as well as Jews not associated with any organization at all.” (pp. 489-490). “According to Dr. Szlomo Katz, a Jewish communist who served in it in 1939, at least 80 per cent of the [Vilna Workers’] Guard was Jewish.” (p. 493).

For more on the work of Marek Wierzbicki, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jewish-disloyalty-1939-war-wierzbicki/

STILL BLAMING POLES FOR JEDWABNE

Gunnar S. Paulsson’s treatment of Jedwabne is incomplete and outdated. The preponderance of evidence demonstrates that Germans, along with a few mostly-coerced Poles, were the actual killers of Jedwabne’s Jews. See Peczkis review of Chodakiewicz: The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jedwabne-how-jan-t-gross-manipulates-facts-chodakiewicz/

See also:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/07/01/jedwabne-update-definitive-work-jedwabne-a-german-disguised-crime-long-suppressed-information-now-available-2000-2003-poles-are-guilty-ipn-commission-refuted-sommer-chodakiewicz-stankiewicz/