Dr Joanna Michlic: Contemporary Polish antisemitism from a global perspective

27th April 2022

This event is co-sponsored by the George Washington University Rabin Chair Forum

In this talk Dr Joanna Michlic discusses key aspects of contemporary Polish antisemitism from a global perspective. Focusing on the use of antisemitic tropes in current politics and public discourse, she demonstrates the remarkable ability of these tropes to be adapted and repackaged to suit the particular political, social, and cultural needs of their advocates.

About this event

Thirty years after the fall of communism, antisemitic tropes have been proving to be as dynamic and versatile as before 1989. In the ‘global post-truth era’, these tropes are especially influential because they proliferate and mutate endlessly on every social media platform, and thus, reach sections of society who might not necessarily have the intellectual skills and historical knowledge to dismiss them as false and as hateful lies. 

This development is not only limited to Poland and post-communist Europe. In the growing antiliberal and antidemocratic cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, we can see the global rise of antisemitism. This development is characterised by ‘geographical and ideological travels’ of different strands of antisemitism of left-wing and right-wing provenance, and by their fusion and mutual feeding on each other.  These global antisemitic connections and mutations require urgent, thorough examination. 

In the case of Poland, the modern national identity, founded upon a matrix of exclusivist ethnonationalism, has been built in opposition to Jews and values associated with Jewishness. The Jew is still evoked as the central Threatening Other to the national collective in the eyes of radical exclusivist ethnonationalistic political groups and their supporters. Today, the far-right repertoire of enemies of the modern vision of Polishness has been expanded to include new perceived threats such as gender-queer studies, multiculturalism and the LGBT community. However, these ‘new enemies’ are often linked to the core traditional enemy of exclusivist ethnonationalistic Poland, the Jew, who is viewed as responsible for the emergence of these new enemies.

Dr Michlic discusses the history, scope, and dynamics of these old and new anti-Jewish tropes. 

Dr Joanna Michlic

Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. She is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Centre for the Study of Collective Violence, the Holocaust and Genocide, UCL Institute for Advances Studies, and Research Fellow at Weiss-Livnat International Centre for Holocaust Research and Education, University of Haifa, June 2019 – May 2022.

She is a co-Editor in Chief of Genealogy Journal. Among her  major publications are Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, (translated into Polish in 2015 and nominated for the Best History Book of Kazimierz Moczarski Award 2016 in Poland; Hebrew translation, with new epilogue, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem Institute, 2021), Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, co-edited with John-Paul Himka (Lincoln, NUP, 2012), and singled co-edited Jewish Family 1939 – Present: History, Representation, and Memory, Brandeis University Press/NEUP, January 2017).

Her latest single-authored monograph is Piętno Zagłady Wojenna i powojenna historia oraz pamięć żydowskich dzieci ocalałych w Polsce (Warsaw, ZIH, December, 2020). She is currently working on a book project on the history and memory of rescue of Jewish children in Poland, More Than the Milk Of Human Kindness: Jewish Survivors and Their Polish Rescuers Recount Their Tales, 1944–1949, and is co-convenor of an international conference on Children, War and Genocide to take place at Munich University in October 2022.