Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival by Geneviève Zubrzycki (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival by Geneviève Zubrzycki Monika Rice Geneviève Zubrzycki. Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Geneviève Zubrzycki’s original scholarship, straddling sociology and anthropology, analyzes conflicting influences of nationalism and religion in crucial moments of cultural transformation. Following one essential book on the Auschwitz cross controversy, and another on the formation of a secular Québécois identity, she turns to address the confounding phenomenon of Jewish revival in Poland. The growing literature on material and symbolic interpretations of what Zubrzycki calls a “Jewish turn” displays a spectrum of assessments. One fascinating development is the formation of an ultracritical “school” of researchers who analyze these complex phenomena as stemming exclusively from antisemitism. Elżbieta Janicka, in particular, in her brilliant and alluring work, casts a clear judgment on some “less-adequate” Polish attempts to recover the memory of Jewish existence in public commemorative and artistic initiatives. Zubrzycki’s approach, in contrast, seems more humanistically underwritten and open to surprising research developments. Upending established canons whenever analyses appear inadequate to the Polish context, her more than a decade of patient, multifaceted research has produced unimpeachable findings. As a foundational premise, Zubrzycki assumes that both “anti-and philosemitism—non-Jews’ support of and even identification with, Jews—are part of a single struggle to define what constitutes Polishness” (2). Like Erica Lehrer, who regards “vicarious Jewishness” as a critique of Polish antisemitism, she posits [End Page 491] that these seemingly contradicting phenomena express multilayered attitudes to the current political climate in Poland. The first part of the book describes cultural sites of a mnemonic Jewish awakening. Zubrzycki begins by crediting the diverse mnemonic practices that indicate both Jewish presence in a given locality and the process of its erasure and tabooization. From the installation of a path tracing the ghetto wall into the pavement of present-day Warsaw, to a project recreating the presence of mezuzot from remnants on the doorframes of Kraków’s Kazimierz district, these initiatives commemorate the dead and indict the intentional acts of postwar forgetting of the Polish Jews, for whatever political and social reasons, not all of which can be ascribed to the Communist control of public discourse. Immediately following, there is an analysis of testimonies gathered in response to Rafal Betlejewski’s artistic action, I Miss You Jew. Although most appear self-serving, even narcissistic, the project garnered positive feedback from both Polish and Jewish communities. In contrast, Betlejewski’s next “performance,” Burning the Barn, on the Jedwabne pogrom, provoked outrage for trivializing the brutal murder and privileging “the expiation of the perpetrators’ sins over respecting Jewish trauma” (86). In chapter 4, Zubrzycki discusses her ethnographic research on encounters in the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Conceding the point that the museum design appears to reinforce thinking of Poles as hosts and Jews as guests, and leaves Jewish history unincorporated into Polish history, she acknowledges that for some visitors from abroad, the experience can yet be “redemptive.” Further challenging the museum’s critics, Zubrzycki legitimately questions, “Should violence and death be the prism through which Jewish history is presented” (107)? There appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question; unearthing one’s buried “dark past” may often conflict with the goals of public education. The second part of the book opens with analyses of non-Jews performing Jewishness, which Zubrzycki identifies as a longing to recreate a “multicultural, colorful, tolerant Poland,” an imagined construct of a multiethnic and multireligious Polish history. This imagined longing for multiculturality takes place through identifying not with large contemporary minorities like the Vietnamese and Ukrainians, but with absent Jews whom Poles desire to return. Considering the paradigm of cultural appropriation insufficient for discussing this phenomenon, Zubrzycki proposes a list of six “registers of engagement” with Jewish culture. Progressing from “crude cultural appropriation,” to “casual engagement,” “romantic engagement,” “critical-introspective engagement,” “political engagement,” and an “empathetic version of appropriation” (157), her typology, which brilliantly situates diverse attitudes toward Jewishness in Poland, may be a useful tool for any future cultural...