A fascinating article in the New York Times about Pawel: a former Nazi skinhead who has changed his ways and become a hasid. 

"Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of a Jewish revival under way in Poland in which hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II."

This might be the strongest evidence presented by the American media of this "revival" to date, and while it's an one to focus on, Pawel's story of transformation is remarkable.

"Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel's maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: that his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust"

The famous (infamous?) "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that hung at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp was stolen early this morning. Avner Shalev, the chairman of Yad Vashem, said "The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days."

Polish police are currently investigating the crime. In the meantime, though, let's look at some of the likely suspects and take a gander at who might be responsible for the theft.

• Neo-Nazis. They seem like even money, since they love denying the Holocaust, glorifying Hitler, and stealing from or defacing Jewish monuments.
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The dude thinks the Holocaust never happened. Maybe stealing the sign is the first step in an nefarious secret plot to steal all of Auschwitz one piece at a time and then claim the place never existed to begin with. 
• Literalists. Perhaps, if work makes you free, someone thought that the sign needed to be freed?
• Drunk Polish teenagers. Somebody makes a dare, somebody feels like they have to do something "big" to fit in with the cool kids at school, and the next thing you know you wake up with Jedidiah Springfield's head in your bed.
• Abe Foxman. Has it been a slow week in antisemitism? Maybe this was a gambit to give him media time to remind everybody that some people hate Jews.
• Movie buffs. Perhaps someone saw Inglorious Basterds (or one of the endless commercials for its DVD release) and figured that if they couldn't bring home a Nazi's scalp, stealing this sign was the next best thing?
• Zombie Hitler. He's undead, and he wants his stuff back. Quick, someone get me a Hollywood screenwriter on retainer.
• People who hate Nazis: While some might interpret stealing something from Auschwitz to be offensive to all the people who died there, others might depict it as giving a hearty "screw you" to the ones who built the place and killed people there.

 

Update (12/20): It looks like the correct answer was "D."

"My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin." So begins the profile of Heino Zytomirski, a young addition to Facebook. Why should we care? Because Heino is dead-a young victim of the Holocaust. His profile and status updates are written by Piotr Buzek, a 22 year-old staff member of the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, Poland. The Center says that it is harnessing new technology to teach the internet generation about the history of Jews in Poland and to keep their memory alive.

To be perfectly honest, I feel queasy about this approach. First of all, much of what the Center does focuses on Lublin's Jewish past. Which is important and necessary. But in doing so, it also looks backwards and not ahead. There is increasing evidence that Jewish communities in Poland not only exist, but are growing. Just look at the articles recently published by JTA. So why isn't the Center celebrating and advertising those triumphs? It could easily choose a young 20-something living Polish Jew to talk about his life, his experiences, and his hopes to friends around the world.

Secondly, how can Heino's story, as horrific as it is, help us today? If more non-Jews are aware of Jewish life in Poland pre-Holocaust and about their subsequent extinction through Heino and his Facebook page, then, again, I applaud the Center's efforts. But it does no good to focus solely on the Holocaust and not address contemporary issues and conflicts. It is not enough to examine the past and proclaim what we should have or would have done. Indeed, it is too easy to demonstrate support for a long-deceased boy from the comfort and safety of our own homes via computer. Efforts like these are gimmicks, superficial stabs at righting old wrongs that we can never right, however we might wish it otherwise. No matter how many friends Heino makes, they will never be able to save him from death.

Issues of anti-Semitism and intolerance and racism continue to exist in Poland, just as they exist everywhere. There are contemporary victims of other types of oppression and violence around the world whose fates are not sealed and for whom our actions can make a difference. These are the people that we should be creating Facebook pages for. The Center could harness the power and energy of social media and its users to offer a means to organize and fight against injustice that can actually make a difference. If nothing else, we owe to it Heino.

 

This post originally appeared on In This Moment and is reprinted with permission. 

Dear Roman Polanski,

So, I heard about that whole "you being arrested in Switzerland" thing. I know you're really suffering right now from all the indignities of having to be in prison for a crime you confessed to committing, but it's really sweet of all your celebrity friends to take time out of their busy avoiding-the-paparazzi-on-Robertson-Boulevard schedules to sign petitions insisting that you be released. A lot of what they say is true: The Pianist and Rosemary's Baby were great films. You've given a lot to the world through your art. However, in addition to directing some of the most legendary films in Hollywood history, you also raped and sodomized a thirteen-year-old girl. I don't even think we need to bother with that "allegedly" part, since you pleaded guilty to the crime just before you left the country and settled into a non-exile exile in the country of your birth, France.

I understand that you've been through a lot, Roman. You managed to escape from the Krakow Ghetto as a child. You lost your mother and many other family members in the Holocaust. Once you managed to achieve success in Hollywood, your pregnant wife Sharon Tate was randomly and cruelly murdered by members of Charles Manson's cult. No one would begrudge you retiring from the business, living out the rest of your life in a quiet country house and becoming a hermit of Salinger-like proportions. No one would judge you for getting lots of therapy to work through the years of hardship and trauma that you endured. But rather than turn inward or find a positive way to channel your pain into art, you chose to project your hurt onto someone else. You drugged and raped a girl who was barely into her teens.

Surviving the Holocaust does not give you permission to rape someone. I don't want to diminish what you or anyone else went through during that horrible time in our world's history, but by sexually brutalizing this young girl you have passed cruelty and hurt down to another innocent person who did not deserve it. Look at all the people - Elie Wiesel is an obvious example - who have used their experiences during the Shoah as inspiration to work for peace and to advocate for other communities facing genocide. You could have risen above what happened to you and become a better person, but you chose not to. Having lived a hard life does not make what you did any more OK. Being famous does not make it OK. Being beloved by celebrities does not make it OK. Being an Oscar winner does not make it OK.

Yom Kippur has already passed, Roman. But it's not too late to atone for what you did.

When I first went to live in Poland in 1994, I didn't know anything about the Polish resistance during the war. I first learned of it in one of the barrack displays at Auschwitz, but I thought then that the word "resistance" referred strictly to the military operation at the beginning of the war, when after 27 days, the major cities were decimated and the Polish army was finally overpowered.

Through extensive research for the World War II thread of my novel, I later found that these 27 days were only the opening salvo of the intricate underground resistance that the Poles orchestrated throughout the five years of Nazi occupation. This network stretched to involve the vast majority of Poles, either in active roles or as sympathetic to the cause. The government-in-exile, located in London from 1939 to 1989, primarily raised funds and tried to convince especially the British and American governments to become more involved in Poland's and the Polish Jews' plight. The partisan fighters spearheaded the efforts inside the country.

The two main umbrella armies for most of the war were the AK (The Home Army) and the AL (The People's Army). At its height, the Home Army alone numbered 350,000 fighters, usually clustered into cells of 3-5 men, only one of whom was in contact with the leaders. Thoughout the war, they were engaged in sabotage (bombing thousands of Nazi trains, train tracks, military vehicles and supply routes) as well as intelligence, setting up networks of messengers, newsletters and radio stations that would broadcast information to the West from the middle of the Polish woods for very short periods of time. There were even a few partisans who were voluntarily interred in labor and death camps so they could help to smuggle information to the outside world about what exactly was occurring there.

Another key mission of the partisans was to deter collaboration with the Nazis. A special detachment of the Home Army was dedicated especially to "revenge"--carrying out the sentences of the underground court system, which actively tried and convicted those Poles who had provided information or other assistance to Nazi soldiers. These collaborators were known as szmalcowniks, so nicknamed after the Polish word for "grease".

But the partisans would not have been able to operate so effectively without the continuous support of the rest of the population. Like the characters of "Pigeon" (most partisans took on animal names as their nom-de-guerre) and Władysław Jagiełło in my novel, many of the partisans spent the entire war effectively homeless, living either in bunkers in the woods or by staying in the barns of sympathetic farmers. Priests and other trusted members of communities kept lists of people who would provide food, shelter and other assistance to the partisans.

There were many Jewish resistance fighters as well, who chose to embed themselves in these cells rather than join the Jewish underground. One of the only first-person partisan accounts I found is a memoir called Fire Without Smoke by Florian Mayevski, a Jewish Pole who fought with the Home Army. In my novel, I wanted to represent these often overlooked Jews, who actively went into combat against the Nazis. After one gruesome visit by the Nazi soldiers in the area, Berek, the son of the Jewish family who lives in the cellar in Half-Village, grows sick of hiding and joins up with the People's Army.

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I've always privileged time for writing over time for reading, so I was late coming to Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I'd already been working on A Long, Long Time Ago on and off for over ten years by that point, but ironically, it was only after I started workshopping and publishing a series of stories set in Moscow that people started telling me, "You've got to read this book."

Now, I tend to read only for daily sustenance, without necessarily dwelling on the individual books, but I definitely remember reading that book.  It was the summer of 2005, and I took it along with me on a trip to Poland, the first leg of which was a few days in the Tatra Mountains with my friend Anna (who inspired the character of Irena in A Long, Long Time Ago).  I started reading it on the long bus ride, and laughed so often through the first chapter that I tried to translate it for Anna into Polish.  That night, we were staying in a one-room cabin, but I was so restless (or maybe jet-lagged) that I took the book into the bathroom and shut the door so Anna wouldn't be woken by the light.  I thought I would read one more chapter to put myself to sleep.  Maybe two.  At five in the morning, I was still sitting on the floor of that bathroom, finishing the last page.

Now that A Long, Long Time Ago is out, a few people (including whoever wrote the jacket copy) have said my book reminds them of Foer's.  Personally, I think Foer is a lot more adventurous in his experimentation with voice and structure, the way he loops back and forth in time, overlapping reality and magical realism.  In fact, these days I use his writing as an example for my students of the possibilities of fiction.  I think of my style as more straight-forward, old-fashioned storytelling, and I think I tend to visualize events in discrete scenes with clean edges.  

As for the material, we're definitely both pulling from the same realm.  World War II and the 90s were the crucial turning points of the 20th Century for both Poland and Western Ukraine, and it would be hard to write a book about either place without including these two time periods.  Also, L'viv/L'wów and Krakow share similar culture and aesthetics, and a common past.  (At several points in their history, modern Ukraine and Poland were joined, or at least jointly occupied by a third country.)  In both cities, Austro-Hungarian facades stand shoulder-to-shoulder with well-intentioned Soviet monstrosities, and the hippest cafés are adorned with collections of old clocks, sewing machines and school desks, a style that can perhaps best be described as "ironic attic chic."  

The rural areas are nearly identical as well.  Villages with names like "Cold Water" and "Squirrel" seem straight out of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jerzy Kosiński.  A few years ago, on a road/cowpath-trip around Bieszczady (in Eastern Poland) with my friend Anita (whose younger self inspired the character of Magda), I couldn't shake the feeling that I was driving through the pages of a storybook, as if at any moment, we might catch a glimpse of Baba Yaga's chicken-feet house or be stopped by a talking fox.  

And just as the mythical and the real coexist, so do the present and the past.  In conversations, people talk about the war as if it were yesterday, and the most hotly debated controversies usually have to do with things that happened several generations before.  Finally, after a long and often shared history of invasion, I think Jews and non-Jews from both countries wield a dark sense of humor as an antidote to suffering.  

Two summers ago, after living in and traveling to Poland for fifteen years, I finally crossed the border to Ukraine.  I spent a month volunteering in a village near the western border, which turned out to be not far from where my father's family is from, and probably not far from the character Jonathan Safran Foer's travels.  When I arrived, I have to say, I was a little disappointed that Alex and Sammy Davis Junior Junior were not waiting in a Lada to pick me up.  And this is probably the greatest testament to Everything Is Illuminated, that Foer, in such a short time was able to absorb and capture that singular atmosphere that I still find difficult to articulate, and create characters that, two years later, felt as if they could come alive and meet me at the train station.  I can only hope that my book will stick with its readers long enough for them to see Poland for themselves.

So what is left of Jewish culture in Poland today?   

In Krakow, there is one operating synagogue (Remuh) with a congregation of about 150.    Estimates of the number of people with Jewish roots who are still living in Poland run into the tens of thousands, but very few of those actually identify with being Jewish.  Why is that?  I'm not entirely sure.  Some were probably never told of their roots or have lost the connection by living in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish society for so many generations.  On occasions when I have heard a young Pole talk about his or her Jewish grandmother (or Roma or Ukrainian grandmother for that matter), it doesn't sound like either pride or shame; it's presented as a benign curiosity, as if they are telling you they are double-jointed or have a twin.

So without a significant Jewish population, is Poland ragingly anti-Semitic?

I'm not Jewish, so of course, it could be possible that I'm just missing something.  But I think that in our world, it's generally true that the worst prejudices reveal themselves behind closed doors, when people feel like they are among "their own kind."  I've been behind many closed doors in Poland, and I have to say that aside from a night at a bar where there was a group of skinheads (who also consider American expats a threat to the gene pool, by the way), I have never personally experienced anyone spewing hate.  (About Jews, I should add.  There is still plenty of bad blood for Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians to go around, and once in a while, I will hear a comment about Africans or Asians that makes me turn around and check which decade I'm living in.)

This doesn't mean that intolerance for Jews isn't still out there skulking around.  I just googled and found a Polish-speaker out there spreading his venom on the Internet.  And as in other countries in Europe, every so often you'll catch a whiff of the Zionist conspiracy theorists, the skinheads, the soccer hooligans and their bottomless cans of spray paint, and those who have just generally been brought up to hate.  The point is that the anti-Semites and the racists comprise a very small percentage of the population now, and they are generally disdained for their prejudices and thought of as uneducated.  In the case of the aforementioned venom-spreader, I found several successive threads from Poles tapping away at their keyboards, telling the first guy off for his ignorance.  

Part of this is due to the political and economic and social changes the country has undergone in the past twenty years.  Today's young Poles have been through a relatively modern school curriculum.  They have studied the history and literature of the Holocaust.  They have learned at least one other language.  About two million Poles have worked somewhere else in the E.U. in the past five years, and vacationing abroad is now much more common than it is among Americans.  To them especially, racism and anti-Semitism tend to be viewed as archaic and backwards.  

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Brigid Pasulka is the author of the novel A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, which takes place in Poland. She is guest-blogging on Jewcy this week, and this is her first post.

 

When I went to Poland for the first time in 1992, I was a junior in college. It was not my idea; I was tagging along with some friends from my study-abroad program in Germany. We had already made it as far as Berlin, and they thought it would be fun to hop over to Poland, so we took the train to Warsaw and found a six-dollar hostel near the train station. (Note to travelers-in any city in Europe, never stay in a place that's near the train station.) I only have vague memories from that trip: broken windows in the station, flocks of pigeons wandering around inside, Kris Kross videos playing on a loop in the waiting room, black market dealers harassing us to sell dollars. All around us the language sounded like angry buzzing and shushing, and when we did approach people on the street (in German because, after all, we were studying German) they were curt. Some of them simply walked away.

Overall, my impression of the country was gray. Poor. Depressing. And I remember thinking that there wasn't even that much to see, since all the buildings dated from 1945. I wrote the entire weekend off as a waste and vowed never to return to Poland.

Then my senior year at Dartmouth, I took a joint literature and history class on the Holocaust. I should have been winding down my education, thinking about my future, but instead I became obsessed with knowing about what had happened to the Jews and how it was possible for human beings to do this to each other. I read voraciously. We went to the just-opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and watched many documentaries. When I would talk with my friends, the topic of the Holocaust somehow always came up. I think that this class, more than my Polish roots or my sense of adventure, was what made me decide not only to return to Poland, but to live there for a year after I graduated.

So when I arrived at the train station in Krakow in August of 1994, I knew far more about Jewish Poles than I did about non-Jewish Poles. I went to see the old synagogue in Kazimierz, the towering memorial in the field at Płaszów, and Oskar Schindler's enamel factory long before I thought about going to the castle or the salt mine. I didn't even know about the legendary Polish resistance against the Nazis until, ironically, I read about it in one of the buildings at Auschwitz.

Some people might find this odd. After all, my family, who came to America from Poland in the early 1900s, are practicing Catholics, I spent most of my childhood in a farming township in rural Illinois, and except for one aunt by marriage, didn't meet anyone Jewish until I was eighteen. Seriously. But in talking with people, I have since learned that this is not all that odd, that the atrocities of the Holocaust are many people's introduction, and sometimes sole knowledge of, Poland.

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Let's play a word association game.  You know how it goes: I give a word and then you tell me the first thing that pops into your head.  Ready?  The word is, Poland.

I'll bet that seventy-five percent of you just thought, anti-semitic.  And the other twenty-five percent, pogrom.

That's okay.  I used to feel that way too.  I still do, to a limited extent, even though I adore Polish poetry and Polish food and I've bored a lot of people at dinner parties with my detailed explanations of Polish history.  You see, I spent a year in Poland on a Fulbright.  (The book I wrote about my experience is being considered by publishers.)  I learned that while Poles like Americans, and they're nice to (white) foreigners in general, many Poles do have strange ideas about Jews.  I'm not talking about outright anti-Semitism.  It's there; but more often, in my own experience, I sensed an unhealthy preoccupation with Jews-a chronic fascination that reminded me of a lingering cold. (A friend and I referred to this as having a "Jew in the throat.") 

Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996: courtesy of Raster gallery, WarsawThere's no doubt that many Poles also have strange attitudes about homosexuals and people of color.  There's no doubt, for that matter, that many Poles have strange attitudes about anyone who isn't "Polish."  Nevertheless, after reading Joe Lockard's and Tomasz Kitlinski's "Still Racist After All These Years" in Zeek, I felt obligated to respond.  While the piece rightfully exposes the unsavory aspects of Polish culture, it is one-sided, at times evincing the same historical "aphasia" with which the authors have diagnosed the Poles.

Lockard and Kitlinski argue that the Polish press' evisceration of Jan Gross-author of the seminal Neighbors, about the Jedwabne massacre of 1941, and Fear, about the postwar Polish pogroms-is evidence of that "historical aphasia."  I agree.  The Polish national myth speaks of a nation that kept its identity through centuries of oppression, which is true enough; but it also-and try not to laugh-speaks of centuries of generosity towards Jews.  A certain kind of Pole (like a certain kind of American) sees questioning any part of the national myth as treason.  Thus the reactions to Gross' books have frequently been a display of nationalism in its most nauseating forms. 

But it is unfair to categorize the reaction to Gross' books as completely representative of the Polish take on Polish-Jewish relations.  In fact, well before the publication of Neighbors, Polish intellectuals were questioning their national myths.  (See Jan Blonski's eloquent "A Poor Pole Looks at the Ghetto," which was first published in 1987.)  In addition, there are a number of established, well-known organizations, like the Znak foundation or the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, that have been investigating the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations for years.  Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's newspaper of record, so frequently has articles about Jewish issues that some refer to it, ironically but not without affection, as the "kosher" paper.

Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996: courtesy of Raster gallery, WarsawIn addition, Lockard and Kitlinski make no mention of the individual Poles who have been working, assiduously and without much fuss, on Jewish issues for years.  Just a few examples include Robert Gadek, who founded Krakow's Center for Jewish Culture; Robert Kuwalek, the Director of the Belzec Memorial Museum; or Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, who, at Lublin's Center for Jewish Studies, is training a generation of historians. 

Make no mistake: in Poland, the guardians of Jewish history are non-Jewish Poles.  But Lockard and Kitlinski don't mention this.  Perhaps because it would show Poland in a more nuanced light.  Indeed, in their article, there is the suggestion that nuance is to be avoided.  They quote one Pawel Machcewicz, a Polish historian who felt that the negative reaction to Gross' books was a "scandal."  So far so good.  But when Machcewicz dares to add that Gross' language is "counter-productive," Lockard and Kitlinski lump him in with Poland's worst elements.  They write: "This sort of ‘yes, but' response is quite typical of both mainstream and right-wing responses to Gross."  But Machcewicz, I'm guessing, was responding to Gross' tone of righteous indignation in Fear-a tone that prompted even this Jew to wonder, "Why does he keep reminding me that a pogrom is a bad thing?"  (I had a similar reaction to Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners; admittedly, though, Gross is a much better writer.)

Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996: courtesy of Raster gallery, WarsawHere, for me, is the heart of the matter.  Lockard and Kitlinski tell us that, "Current right-wing political sentiment in Poland does not want to be reminded that it was not only the Nazis who were responsible for the elimination of the country's Jewish population."  While I might ask if a sentiment can be reminded of anything, I don't disagree with the essence of this statement.  But it is a conflation of culpability.  The interwar atmosphere of anti-Semitism; the pogroms before, during, and after the Nazi occupation; the expulsions of 1968: all these events point to a consistent history of anti-Jewish sentiment.  However, I am extremely uncomfortable with the mention of Nazis and Poles in the same breath.  During the Nazi occupation, thousands of Polish Christians risked their lives, and died, saving thousands of Polish Jews.  I can understand that for many Jews, this heroism is mitigated by the brutality of Jedwabne and Kielce.  But to portray Poles as consistently brutal or consistently heroic is not telling the whole story.

And what about today?  Well, again, Lockard and Kitlinski are right: we are seeing an increase in unfavorable attitudes about Jews in Poland (and elsewhere).  And again, this is not the whole picture: we are also seeing Poles becoming more interested in their country's Jewish past.  (Speaking personally, I will admit to cynical feelings about Krakow's Kazimierz district, with its "Jewish" restaurants and Schindler's List tours, but I have met too many sincere Poles to see this interest as completely mercenary.)

One afternoon, in the summer of 2004, I stopped by the Center of Jewish Studies to drop off a book.  I dawdled when I overheard a (Polish Christian) professor giving an oral exam to one of his (Polish Christian) students.

"And what happens on Yom Kippur?" the professor asked.

"Um, we don't eat," the student said. 

"Good.  For how long?"

"For, um, twenty-four hours."

I stifled a laugh.  There was something very sweet about this exchange, how casual it was, in the student's halting responses and his unconscious use of first-person plural.  He obviously hadn't studied much, but so what?  Here were a couple of Poles, talking about Jews as an aspect of their own history. 

I suppose, in the end, that this is another "yes, but" response.  Yes, in Poland, I saw much that echoed the atmosphere of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia that Lockard and Kitlinski describe.  But I also a people longing for normality-longing to prosper, to reconsider their past, and to nurture an atmosphere of tolerance.

Gordon Haber was formerly Zeek's Fiction Editor and is currently at work on a novel about the messiah.

All by images from artist Zbigniew Libera's series Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996. 

Last autumn my department produced for BBC Radio 3 a 45-minute documentary about how Yiddish is being kept alive today in New York City. [The audio isn't up anymore but have a look/listen to the audio slide show.] One of the comments that really struck me was from a member of a svive on the Upper West Side explaining his motivation for getting together on a regular basis with other people to talk Yiddish:

"...[T]here is so much memorialising about the Holocaust and yet so few people know anything about who those people were. You never learn five six [million] of them spoke Yiddish another good five ten per cent spoke Ladino in the Balkan countries. People mourn these people and yet they don't know anything about their culture. And I realised you can't mourn somebody without understanding them and to me it became a way of keeping something about them alive... I grew up in the eighties on Long Island, typical conservative Hebrew school and the Holocaust was a very, very large part of our curriculum and yet we learned absolutely nothing about the way that those people lived." 

The story of the bagel in prewar Poland is basically a story of what everyday life was like. For starters almost half of all the country's bakeries were Jewish owned - in other words way out of proportion to the overall size of the Jewish population which made up about 10%. When you see those kinds of numbers you get a tangible feel for just how important those Jewish bakers were for the towns and cities of Poland. And because the bagel was such a popular food you find lots of observations about them - some more serious than others (in 1934 one sociologist did a survey of 129 of Warsaw's 600 bagel peddlers) but all of them provide memorable pictures.  Like the rabbi in a medium sized town whose supper - reflecting his somewhat better off social status - was usually a glass of tea and 'a day-old bagel.' Or the hiding place for the socialist conspirators hollowed out under the bagel kettle. Or the the young woman bagel peddler in Warsaw who lost her leg running away from a policeman (who would have arrested her because she had no licence to peddle) but continued to hobble along on a wooden stump with her basket of bagels because there was nothing else she could make a living from.

I'd argue that this kind of history - this history of the everyday - is crucial to understanding the thorny subject of Polish-Jewish relations.

Within Poland there are a number of initiatives to make this kind of history available to a wider public. In the town of Lublin, for example, TNN a theatre group that started in 1992 on the site of the gate between the Jewish and gentile parts of the city has a growing archive of oral history about life in Lubin before World War II (there are many memories of buying bagels). And then there is Warsaw's planned Jewish Museum which is going to have galleries which commemorate the culture and work of Poland's Jewish community since the 10th century as well as a section on the Holocaust. Yes, it has attracted controversy in the world wide Jewish community - some New York friends of mine, for example, refused to donate any money, for them Poland is a cemetery best left alone. But to my mind those hundreds of years before the Holocaust were crucial to today's Jewish community and to today's Poland. They cannot be completely divorced. Not everyone will agree. Novelist Dara Horn, for example, takes issue with the argument I make in my book that Jews did not live in a world apart in Poland.

Maria Balinska, author of The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

Poland, like other societies in Europe and Asia, is struggling with how to address new issues of multiculturalism and minority sub-cultures. How will it guarantee equal citizenship to ‘non-Polish’ Poles and render that divisive distinction redundant? The question attaches to visible racial minorities such as tens of thousands of immigrant Vietnamese market-sellers and small-business people; Asian-ized Polish ethnic repatriates and their children from Kazakhstan and elsewhere in central Asia; historically marginalized Roma; and queers, who challenge heteronormative civic and religious definitions of true Polish identity. Each of these communities represents a separate but linked social challenge: how will the ‘stranger’ become ‘Polish’? Or to rephrase for more precision, why should a minority transform itself into ‘normality’ in order to participate fully as co-equal citizens?

All minorities represent a challenge to the right-wing xenophobes that dominate Polish life. Because it has no colonial legacy that manifests as significant immigration from Asia or Africa, Poland remains the ‘whitest’ nation in the European Union. In this context, a vituperating racism and anti-gay rhetoric flourishes. While, for example, the Polish government rushed to condemn parliamentarian Artur Górski's recent statement that Obama’s election represented “the end of the white man’s civilization”, this was simply damage control after a highly impolitic statement harming Polish interests in Washington. Górski is a member of the governing conservative Law and Justice party, and will not face serious consequences. His mistake was simply that he voiced aloud what many feared silently. What Górski stated was at root a race-civilization claim: if Washington had turned black, then Warsaw was still white and its whiteness was endangered.

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Well folks, my summer of traveling just ended with a brief visit to my ancestral home of Omaha, Nebraska.  Despite the fact that I was there for ostensibly professional reasons (I was honored to participate in the fantastic annual Omaha Lit Fest, which is turning into quite a major event) the trip was fraught as usual with the ghosts of the past; despite the disconcerting presence of a new American Apparel, it’s still my hometown, and being there, I couldn’t help but reflect on my childhood and adolescence, and for probably the millionth time, what it was like growing up Jewish in a place where being Jewish is still at least semi-weird.

I’ve written extensively about this (it’s so comfortable to revisit postions we’ve already taken, isn’t it?) and I’m not going to go into my personal experience here; if you’re interested, you can read my book.  But being home reminded me of a strange little news item I caught sight of a couple of weeks ago, and have since meant to call to your attention.

Blumberg Family Jewish Community Services is offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, Alabama—a town of 58,000 known as the Peanut Capital of the World (although I think a few towns in Georgia might dare to differ).  It's a kind of yiddische Homestead Act set smack in the cradle of Dixie, and the terms are simple: the families stay at least five years, become active in the local synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, and the money never has to be repaid.  

Jews in the South are nothing new, and historically, were in some ways more visible and prominent than their co-religionists in the North.  The oldest continual Jewish community in the United States is in Charleston, South Carolina, where a group Portuguese Jews first settled 300 years ago.  Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State of the short-lived Confederate States of America was a Jew (a fact conveniently forgotten by so many of today’s good ol’ boys who proudly emblazon the Stars and Bars on the sides of their pick-up trucks and semi-automatic weapons); and during my stopover in the Memphis airport on my way back to New York, I counted as many yarmulkes as one might see in, if not New York, than certainly Chicago. 

Today, more Jews than ever—almost 400,000—are making their homes in the South, but they tend to be Northern transplants clustered in urban areas like Atlanta and Birmingham (rather than in the kinds of towns we Yankees are used to viewing in sepia toned movies, accompanied by haunting shots of live oaks draped in Spanish moss and the sound of somebody throatily humming the word “Jesus” over and over again off screen—a sure sign in the language of film that something bad, sinister, and racially tinged is about to happen.)  As a result, small-town synagogues are closing, and once close-knit communities have dissolved.  In the article I read, a woman named Thelma Nomberg, who grew up in nearby Ozark and was the only Jewish student in the region’s public schools in the 1940’s put it simply: “We are dying.”

This is undoubtedly true and painful to the men and women watching their communities wither and disappear, and the Blumberg organization is to be commended for their attempt to recognize and revitalize the history and heritage of the Jewish South.

That said, I can’t help but feel that the city elders of Dothan, who have expressed enthusiasm about the plan, have slightly different motives here.  

As someone who grew up in a rural state (admittedly not Southern, but a population of 58,000 is practically a megalopolis for some parts of Nebraska), I feel I can safely say that the death of small town America is hardly an exclusively Jewish problem.  Jews may have disappeared from small towns, but so have people.  As big-box retailers curtail and eventually murder local businesses, as factories shut down, as opportunities grow ever scarcer, talented and ambitious young people take flight, seeking their fortunes elsewhere, and never come back. 

They call it the brain drain.  Left behind are the elderly and those with few other options. To survive, such towns (and I’m not speaking of Dothan in particular, but depressed areas in general), require new residents with the skills and energy to attract business rather than drive it away, and in some cases, radically remake the fabric of the community. In the Midwest, a new influx of Latino immigrants has helped to correct some of the imbalance, bringing new vitality to stagnant areas, but in the conservative South where xenophobic fervor tends to run high, this option is perhaps seen as less tenable.  

You need a middle class?  Bring in the Jews.  Any student of Jewish history might feel a faint quiver of recognition.

In the twelfth century, when Jews were massacred and eventually expelled from England and France, the Polish prince Boleslaus III had an idea: why not invite them to Poland?  He was struggling to transform his country into a mercantile culture, Jews were educated and good with money and needed a place to live.  At the time, Lithuania, which comprised much of Poland was still officially a pagan state (it would remain so until 1386, when Poland offered its crown to the Lithuanian Grand Duke, and was the last country in Europe to Christianize); there would be no significant religious obstacle from its people.  Rich in resources and underdeveloped, Poland was ready and waiting for the beleaguered and brainy Hebrews.  

Casimir the Great: good for the jewsAs they say in Fiddler on the Roof, it was a perfect match.  Over the next two hundred years, Jews flooded into Poland, almost exclusively forming the middle class—a liaison between the agrarian peasants and the cultured aristocracy.  The odd flare-up of anti-Semitic violence certainly occurred, but compared to the horrors Jews had endured in Crusades-mad Western Europe, these hardly seemed reason for pause.  In 1264, Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz, which officially granted all Jews the freedom of worship, travel, and most importantly, trade.  Poland became the center of Jewish life in Europe, culminating under the beloved proto-liberal Casimir the Great (1303-1370) who expanded Jewish rights and protection to such an extent that he was known as “Casimir, King of the Serfs and Jews.”  

Unfortunately, if you’ll remember, it went downhill, or we’d all be speaking Polish right now.  

Thus far, Dothan has not proved nearly as attractive to urban Jews as medieval Poland, and unless the approximately seventeen gentiles in Great Neck lose their minds and start a riot against the Silvermans next door, this seems unlikely.  But the Jews who have settled in Dothan seem to find an extremely hospitable place.  As Rabbi Lynne Goldsmith of Temple Emanu-El points out: “The Northeast has a very warped perception of what the South is all about….the South is a wonderful place to be.  The people are warm and friendly.  There’s very little traffic, and best of all, there’s no snow.”

Let’s just hope she’s singing the same tune 500 years from now.

Prince Charles: goes looking for a mezuzah Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla arrived in Poland today to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish community center in Krakow’s Kazimierz Jewish quarter. While the project was overseen by World Jewish Relief (a charity group based in London and credited with aiding Jewish children in escaping the Nazi regime during World War II), the inspiration for and funding of the center came directly from the Prince of Wales.

In 2002, Charles met with many of Krakow’s Holocaust survivors and was so moved by their stories that he decided to commit himself to the building of a community center. Many of the survivors he initially spoke with were present at today’s ceremony, including Ryszard Orowski, who lost all of his relatives in the Holocaust. Orowski expressed his joy and amazement over the project: "Never did we imagine that we would have a center, a home for the whole community of Krakow."

Prince Harry: fashion faux pasThe center will be used by about one thousand neighboring community members, ranging from elderly citizens to Polish students at Krakow University. It will be open to Jews and non-Jews alike for all sorts of social, religious, and educational activities.

As a token of gratitude, Prince Charles was given the honor of nailing the mezuzah on the front door of the center, making for one of a few rather excellent photo ops.

It is probably no coincidence that the opening of the center coincides with Yom Hashoah, and thus far plans have gone off without a hitch -- unlike three years ago when the British Royal family’s plans to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day went Prince Charles Says: want to play torah slides and ladders?terribly awry after every tabloid from here to Tel Aviv had a photo of Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi soldier on its cover. Also notable is that the Prince and Duchess’s presence at the opening of the community center comes less than a month after the Jerusalem Post published an article exposing the United Kingdom as “the European center of anti-Semitism.” According to Oxford-educated Hebrew University Professor Robert S. Wistrich, anti-Semitism is so implicit in British culture – literary, political, and otherwise – that Brits can’t even recognize it anymore.

Not to belittle his efforts in Krakow, but maybe Prince Charles should take that kippah and hammer and head over to a synagogue in his own hometown.

Dear Jewcy Aficionados: Dzien dobry from the Krakow airport. I have just wrapped up an unofficial 72-hour Jewish immersion holiday and thought I would offer a few travel tips for those of you who plan on making a pilgrimage this summer. I’m guessing that many of you will be more familiar with the region’s Hebraic history before visiting Poland, but I thought you might still mildly benefit from the random observations of a lay lapsed Catholic American secularist:

• It would be facile (not to mention condescending) for me to comment on how soul-deadening it is to see Auschwitz firsthand, but I did want to share a couple of tidbits from our excellent, somber, forthright tour guide. After explaining that these weren’t my views, but that rather I had “written about Holocaust deniers” (scholarly, no…but still technically accurate), I asked if they’d ever encountered any on the tour. She said no, but added that there had been a couple of teenagers with a Scandinavian school group who espoused Nazi ideals. They were immediately sent home because it is illegal in Poland to express those views. Apparently, a professor was even fired from his job for translating a David Irving book, even after making it clear these weren’t his beliefs in the introduction. Considering the horrific immediacy of the surroundings, the free speech question never entered my mind, but I did find one thing the tour guide told me interesting. She said, “We aren’t bothered by the Holocaust deniers. We are scared by those who sympathize with the Nazis, especially amongst the young, because it is easy to influence their minds.” I guess it makes some sense, but it was striking to hear that Holocaust deniers are no big deal while walking alongside the Birkenau train tracks.

• Hot Dogs: at auschwitzI was stunned to learn that, thanks in large part to the efforts of those who been imprisoned there, the camps were opened to the public a mere two years after the liberation. Two years. So, let’s recap: In a poor, desolate country, physically destroyed by World War II, people who were left with nothing after surviving the Nazi nightmare got Auschwitz up and running by 1947 to bear witness to the atrocities they had just experienced. I think you know where I’m going with this…I realize it’s not apples-to-apples, but it sure makes the seven years of Ground Zero squabbles seem awfully small.

• Casting no aspersions on fellow tourists, but it is very strange to watch people take photos of themselves in front of the crematorium.
  

• They sell hot dogs at the Auschwitz snack bar. I’ll let that sink in for a moment... In fact, the only food available for lunch that can quickly be wolfed down before the bus to Birkenau is the hot dog. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but both my wife and I thought it was a traditional frankfurter. And we do enjoy our frankfurters. By the way, the hot dog? Delicious. It was served on this crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside roll, it came with a homemade relish of big chunks of pickled onions and cabbage, and was topped off with killer tangy ketchup. From the center of Krakow, the Auschwitz tour is an all-day deal, so the sale of nourishing non-kosher concentration camp hot dogs sure seemed like one final twist of the knife.

• Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz has been reborn since the fall of the Commies. It’s bustling with coffee shops, restaurants, hipster hotels, bookstores, boutiques, etc., and we were told that a lot of the entrepreneurs are the grandchildren of those who were persecuted by the Nazis. That seemed reassuring. However, we stopped into an art gallery with an exhibit--a modern art black-and-white-photos-covered-in-spray-paint collage kind of thing. The picture in the window had two topless women, and the head of a bald man had been pasted over one of the ample-bosomed bodies. The proprietor told us it was a nationalistic Polish priest with a popular radio program (probably Father Tadeusz Rydzyk) who shovels “anti-Semitic propaganda.” This was not reassuring.

• Ostoya Palace Hotel: where the maids are hotWord on the Euro street is that Krakow is the hotspot for stag parties and that the town has a thriving sex trade. I didn’t notice an excess of strip bars or sex shops, but then again, we spent most of our time in the Medieval castles-and-churches section. After all, it’s an anniversary trip, and I’m old. What I can attest to, is that Krakow has an incredibly high number of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful women, including our maid at the Ostoya Palace hotel. Fellas, the dollar still owns the zloty, so you may want to take that into consideration before booking Vegas this summer.

• If you are the kind of person who can power through a full day of sightseeing, I recommend taking the Wieliczka Salt Mines tour as rejuvenation after getting your spirit crushed at Auschwitz. Basically, you walk down a labyrinth of wooden stairs (reaching some 440 feet) into a massive mine filled with statues made of salt, walls made of salt (I licked them for proof) and an enormous chapel with a giant chandelier that hosts weddings, concerts and Sunday mass. There’s even a salt lake where a bunch of drunken Austrians capsized a boat and suffocated to death a century ago. There’s also a health center on the grounds for the traditional salt bath. Salt isn’t like coal or copper: It's good for the system, and great for the lungs. Plus, it’s always a balmy 55-60 degrees in the mine, so the dudes that toiled down there were healthier than the general populace. The Nazis took Wieliczka over and used it as a munitions factory (I think that’s what our guide said) and it was the only time slave labor was ever used in the mine. During World War II, people from the nearby Plaszow camp were brought over to work in the mines. Consider this if you will: you’re a Jewish factory worker reassigned to Wieliczka in say 1940. You bust your hump in the mines for the next few years, which ironically helps with the old lifespan. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume you’re down in the middle of the Earth without much access to the goings on at the extermination camps a few miles away. I’m not saying they’re lucky; they were slaves to the Nazis, after all. However, the mine job with the clean air and the comfortable temperature had to lead to one hell of a whopping guilt complex in the Krakow daylight.

• Oldsmobil: krakow's american-themed car barI lied. Salt mines won’t do the trick. Might I suggest the “Wodka Sampler” at the U.S. car-themed bar, Oldsmobil. I don’t know what happened to the “e,” but the six shots are smooth and clean. And the owner does a great impression of an American that didn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met. Much needed jocularity, though. Na zdrowie!

• One last note for my fellow American travelers. We aren’t as popular these days, as I was reminded late one night in the land of my ancestors. A sousy Irish bride told me she had never been to “the States” and didn’t care if she ever did. Then she snarled, “Thanks for George W. Bush.” And this was the day after she got married. And this was after a friendly half-hour chat with her husband about New York City architecture and the Philadelphia Eagles. And the Irish are suppose love us. (Note to the County Cork gent who inquired: No, Bill Clinton is not generally regarded as one of the five greatest Presidents of all time.)

So, to the kid from the Oregon private school on the World War II trip--the one in the Jewish bookstore in Kazimierz who insisted on hectoring the young sales girl with variations of, “When the Nazis came, why didn’t they just pretend they weren’t Jews?” You know who you are. The clerk patiently responded about the importance of religion, the poor uneducated populace, the powerlessness… She was being sincere. You were being a dick. That ain’t helping our cause. From one former punk teen to another, you’re better than that.

And she was hot. You sniveling little fuck.

From Cracovia with love,

Patrick J. Sauer

Related: The Connoisseur's Guide to Internet Anti-Semitism

A Washington Post article about the revival of interest in exorcisms in Eastern Europe made us wonder whether Judaism has any similar traditions. The answer is surprising!

In the article, one Polish Catholic reverend discussed his plans to build a “spiritual oasis" that will serve as Europe's only center dedicated to performing exorcisms. He’s got the support of the Vatican, and last year Poland hosted the fourth International Congress of Exorcists, which attracted over 300 exorcism practitioners from around Europe.
Exorcism: it ain't pretty
Exorcisms these days aren’t like what you see in the movies, but they’re not exactly pleasant, either. The WaPo article goes on to explain:

Exorcists said the people they help can be in the grip of evil to varying degrees. Only a small fraction, they said, are completely possessed by demons -- which can cause them to display inhuman strength, speak in exotic tongues, recoil in the presence of sacred objects or overpower others with a stench.

In those cases, the exorcists must confront the devil directly, using the power of the church to order it to abandon its host. More often, however, priests perform what some of them refer to as "soft exorcisms," using prayer to rid people of evil influences that control their lives.

It still sounds pretty crazy, and you may be patting yourself on the back for not being a part of such a wacky religion, but it turns out Jews have been doing our own version of exorcisms for centuries.
Dybbuks: circumcised demons, basically
Apparently we’re not so concerned about evil spirits. It’s the souls of the dead that cause problems for us Jews. An article from ghostvillage.com explains:

A human being that is possessed by a spirit or some otherworldly creature is a phenomenon found in a myriad of cultures and religions. Jewish folklore calls the spirit that causes this rare but remarkable occurrence a "dybbuk."

A dybbuk (pronounced "dih-buk") is the term for a wandering soul that attaches itself to a living person and controls that person's behavior to accomplish a task. The word "dybbuk" is the Hebrew word for "cleaving" or "clinging.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler has been studying Jewish folklore, spirituality, and its shamanic roots for more than 25 years. He has written books covering the Jewish perspective on ghosts, apparitions, magic, and reincarnation, including a book titled Dybbuk. I spoke to Rabbi Winkler about dybbuk from his office at the Walking Stick Foundation in the wilderness of New Mexico.

Rabbi Winkler said, "[Jews] don't believe in demonic possession. We believe that, on very rare occasions, there can be a possession of a living person by the soul of one who has left the body, but not the world, and they're seeking a body to possess to finish whatever they need to finish."

Winkler explained how stories of dybbuk go back to ancient scriptures. In the Old Testament of the Bible, in the Book of Samuel (18:10), a bad spirit is briefly described as attaching itself to King Saul, the first king elected chieftain of the ancient tribes of Israel: "And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul..." Later in the Bible, in the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah is possessed by the spirit of a dead man who is trying to get the prophet to trick the King into going to war when he wasn't supposed to. Winkler said, "You have stories like that, that just nonchalantly mention spirits of people who have left us coming down to effect some change, some phenomenon in this world."

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• The year's best picture books, including this photo from "A Celebration of Black Fatherhood," by Carol Ross. [The Washington Post]

• Peter Schjeldahl reviews "The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture," by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. [The New Yorker]

• In "AK47: The Story of the People's Gun," Michael Hodges traces the history of the "Coca-Cola of firearms" from the adolescence of Mikhail Kalashnikov to the Peole's Liberation Front in Vietnam. The review reads, "The book works thanks to some spectacular reportage and because its author traces, without glorification, how the appliance of science kills human beings, building the narrative around people like those kids in sub-Saharan Africa where the AK 'moved from being a tool of the conflict to the cause of the conflict.'" [The Guardian]

• An economist leaves western Pennsylvania and road trips it with his wife around the U.S.A. But instead of just passing through the Middle of Nowhere, they stop, stay and take jobs like desk clerk and waitress. The result: Michael Yates's "Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue." [Z Magazine]

• The poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, one of the most important figures in postwar Polish literature. [The New York Times]

• Ron Currie Jr. quotes Nietzsche for the title and sets his collection of stories, "God is Dead," in Darfur. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

The New York Times, proud of its centuries-long tradition of reporting on "trends" years after their expiration dates, was contemplating what to cover in July 2007. The up-and-coming Lower East Side? Nah, better wait five years. The East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry? That could be good. How about that new personal computing trend of using so-called "floppy disks" to store kilobytes of information from the computer? Genius!

But in the end, the Paper of Record bought a ticket abroad to see what life was like for Jews in post-Jewish Eastern Europe. Thus it came up with a piece on Krakow's Festival of Jewish Culture, citing a phenomenon as "beginning" when it's been happening for almost two decades. The article could easily have been written in 1995. In fact, it sort of was.

Here's The New York Times, July 12, 2007:

KRAKOW, Poland — There is a curious thing happening in this old country, scarred by Nazi death camps, raked by pogroms and blanketed by numbing Soviet sterility: Jewish culture is beginning to flourish again.

"Jewish style" restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.

... with relatively few Jews, Jewish culture in Poland is being embraced and promoted by the young and the fashionable.

..."You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal," said Konstanty Gebert, founder of a Polish-Jewish monthly, Midrasz. "It's like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain."

Here's The International Herald Tribune, July 17, 1995:

... Throughout the festival week, the old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, and other parts of the city were the scene of concerts, theatrical performances, exhibitions, films, street happenings and workshops rooted in Jewish heritage.

... The irony of staging a Jewish festival for a predominantly non-Jewish audience, in what essentially is a Jewish ghost town, has been apparent from the beginning.

... In addition, chic new Jewish style restaurants, cafes, bookstores, and galleries have been opened. There is a new Jewish Culture Center, and a local travel agency specializes in tours of sites related to Steven Spielberg's movie "Schindler's List," which was shot in Krakow.

...fascination with the Jewish world destroyed by the Holocaust has grown among many non-Jews in the region.

New Jewish museums, study programs and seminars abound, and Jewish books proliferate even in countries where few Jews remain.

... It's as if the vacuum created by the Holocaust physically demands to be filled — whether or not there are Jews to fill it.

Next up, The Times plans to send a reporter to Afghanistan to report on the growing use of "Mujahideen" to combat Soviet troops.

Wprost coverWprost is a weekly Polish newsmagazine known for its conservative and anti-German sentiments. Check out this cover, photoshopped in response to clashes with Germany over the new EU treaty at the European Union Summit last week. The BBC reports:

The mocked up image shows Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, nuzzling at [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel's chest.

Germany's Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the image "tasteless".

Social Democrat Markus Meckel, head of the German-Polish parliamentary group, said: "It is quite unbelievable. Poland has lost so many friends over the past weeks and months. It should really think hard in the future about how it hopes to win them back."

Who comes up with these cover schemes? I know Europeans are pretty cool with boobs but I agree Frank-Walter Steinmeier. It can't help but wonder how this country would react if, say, Newsweek or Time put boobs on their covers. They'd probably sell more issues than ever and then be relegated to "satellite". Now there's one for all you techies to figure out...

The good will of "New Europe" is no more, thanks to the bumbling of President Bush, says Anne Applebaum:

Putin's Cold War rhetoric is beginning to worry people all across the continent; he must be counting it a huge success. Yet it seems no one in the Pentagon ever imagined that anyone might object to the project, or that the locals might want some extra reassurance, or that a bit of judicious diplomacy might have smoothed the way in advance. According to some, the State Department didn't even know the missile shield was going ahead until the Pentagon had already made the decision. Sound familiar?

The only quibble I have with Applebaum's argument is that it doesn't take into account how amenable Old Europe has once more become to American interests. France and Germany now have heads of state with a professed tendency toward Washington, made ever starker by the possible vacancy in the role of world partner that will attend the resignation of Tony Blair in Britain.

Though there's every reason to suspect that David Cameron or Gordon Brown would be more reliable Atlanticists than they let on to their constituencies: Sarkozy and Merkel get away with snuggling up to Washington because their countries both opposed the one U.S. foreign policy decision credited with blackening our reputation: the war in Iraq.

Of course, that the administration has chosen now to press for the installation of the missile shield is telling in another way. It suggests that Bush has learned little since 2000, when an anti-nuclear defense system was a point in his virgin presidential campaign. (Instead of a "freedom doctrine" or nation-building, zapping rockets from outer space was on chief security concern of the GOP candidate.)

So the rationale that such a shield is designed to protect the United States from Iran and North Korea--regimes which have not yet got missiles that can reach the United States and certainly didn't have them in 2000--is transparently false. However, Applebaum is quite right to stress that Kremlin knows that the shield is not designed to antagonize Russia, which still ranks at the largest owner of nuclear warheads on the planet.  Recall that the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld had signaled China as the most exigent  military threat to the U.S. in the 21st century. China is the likelier target for such a hapless deterrent. 

Of course, it scarcely helps that Moscow and Beijing are bosom buddies on everything from human rights abuses to kleptocratic third world oil deals to squashing any attempt to bring justice to the criminal state murders of democratic reformists like Rafiq Hariri.

Welcome to the New World Order. Same as the old, really. 

Irena SandlerA 97-year-old Polish woman was honored today for saving 2500 Jews during the Holocaust. In the ceremony at Parliament, the Polish President Lech Kacyzinski said that Irena Sandler deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. (if for nothing else than being able to keep count of all those she saved, no doubt)

Sandler, who lives in a nursing home was too frail to attend the ceremony, but received major commendation from all.

“I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community,” Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. “I think that her courage is a very special one.”

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations.”

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

Money grubbing Jews as depicted by Lodz artists.The Jewish Theater of New York's season debut, "Last Jew in Europe" opened yesterday. The play is described as a tragicomedy and follows the story of one interfaith couple in Lodz, Poland on the road to wedded bliss. The comedic part ensues when the couple, a Polish Jew and his Catholic fiancee, meet a Mormon who has come to Lodz (which also happens to be the anti-semitic capital of the world in this play) to reveal the town's Jewish families. As the husband-to-be has concealed his religion from his fiancee, you can see where all of this convoluted, foiled plot is headed.

What makes the play all the more surreal is that is based on a true story. I'm assuming liberties were taken with the Mormon subplot, but perhaps not in the disclosure of the play's location.

The Jewish Theater of New York invites New Yorkers on a trip, lasting one-hour, twenty-five minutes, to a city that’s an anti-Semite’s Paradise, existing today, and located right in the middle of the EU. Welcome to Lodz, Poland, where anti-Jewish declarations are graphically exhibited in almost every street corner and calls for sending Jews back to the gas chambers go unchallenged.

Our Self-Imposed GhettoA booklet entitled "Civilizations At War In Europe" distributed by Polish MEP Maciej Giertych to the European Parliament is sparking its share of concern. The 32-page brochure outlines the Jewish peoples' desire of separateness as the root of ghetto culture.

In his brochure, published in Strasbourg last week, he wrote of Jewish people: "It is a civilization of programmed separateness, of programmed differentiation from the surrounding communities ... By their own will, they prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities ... They form the ghettos themselves ..."

An EU spokesperson said that they don't condone this behavior or any act of "anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or racism."

In related news, distribution of the blood libel book was halted...for now.

Secret Agent Monsignor: Stanislaw WieglusThe history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors -- and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II -- with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"

Graham Greene split his loyalties between Rome and Moscow and may have once been approached by a charismatic whorehouse-frequenting KGB agent in Estonia to do some "dry work" in England and elsewhere. The same liturgical socialism infected, to varying degree, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who remains fond enough of the totalitarian mindset to place the crown of thorns upon the heads of Al-Qaeda and compare suicide bombers to Rosa Luxemburg in the pages of the Guardian.

I bring this up because it appears that Holy Mother Church is intent on replaying a miniature in-house version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The divine election of a pope who was once a member of the Nazi Youth was first; now comes the news that the Archbishop of Warsaw was an informant for Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (S.B.), Poland's Communist secret police apparat:

Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.

“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

Whoops.

Right-wing Catholic nutters are trying to pass legislation that would make Jesus "king" of Poland:

If the bill becomes law, Jesus will follow the path of the Virgin Mary, who was declared honorary queen of Poland by King John Casimir 350 years ago.

The motion has been backed by MPs from the far right League of Polish families (LPR), the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the Peasants' Party (PSL).

Now if Mary is queen and Jesus is king, doesn't that make their mother-son court more appropriate to Vienna than Warsaw?