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ABSTRACT
While Michael Checinski's anonymously-published piece “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism, 1956-1968” from the first issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs in 1971 can be read as both an analysis of antisemitism in Communist Poland and as a scholarly artifact that illustrates the manner in which the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Jewish communities in the region were studied and understood at the height of the Cold War, it also tells us much about the study of East European Jewry and other, related fields over the past fifty years. Indeed, key parts of Checinski's analysis including its focus on the Soviet Union's anti-Jewish policies, its emphasis on the corrosive if not inherently evil nature of the Soviet Union, and its examination of antisemitism in Poland remain central topics in the study of Soviet and East European Jewry. Moreover, while the Soviet Union has long passed into the annals of history, many of the same historical themes, narrative tropes and scholarly frameworks that once helped researchers frame the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are now critical parts of scholarly efforts to construct and explicate another important sub-field in the realm of Jewish studies, the study of antisemitism, including debates regarding the “New Antisemitism.” In this and other ways, Checinski's essay exemplifies not only the manner in which Cold War tensions, ideologies and anxieties shaped the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for generations but also how they continue to influence the study of Soviet and East European Jewry and other, related fields to this day.
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Notes
1 Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
2 For a discussion of knowledge and its division and organization, see Foucault, The Order of Things.
3 Ronald Reagan, “President Reagan's Speech before the National Association of Evangelicals,” Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983.
4 See, for example, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 366–74 and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. For pieces representing the viewpoints of East Central European intellectuals on some of these questions, see Czesław Miłosz, “About Our Europe,” 99–108 and Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” 33–8. On the study of Russian and Soviet Jewry during the height of the Cold War, see Jacob Barnai's biography of the Jerusalem-based historian Shmuel Ettinger, Barnai, Shmuel Ettinger, 272–85. For more on the impact of the Cold War on the study of Jewish history, see Sinkoff, From Left to Right.
5 For a summary of Stephen Roth's many activities, see Spier, “Stephen J. Roth, 1915–1995,” 101–2. I should note that from 2010 to 2020, I was Director of Tel Aviv University's Stephen J. Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, a body which for many years before my tenure embraced a similar combination of scholarship and activism. For a discussion regarding the impact of this dualism on the study of antisemitism, see Ury, “Strange Bedfellows? Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Fate of ‘the Jews’,” 1151–71.
6 See, “Editorial Note,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 1, (1971), last accessed, May 3, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13501677108577074
7 For more on these developments, see Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry and Ury, “Who, What, When, Where, and Why Is Polish Jewry?”
8 The author's identity is revealed in an article published a year later by Checinski in Soviet Jewish Affairs. See Checinski, “An Intended Polish Explanation, December 1956,” 82 (Editor's note).
9 See Checinski's memoir, Michael Moshe Checinski, Running the Gauntlet.
10 Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism. Also see, Checinski, “Soviet Jews and Higher Education,” Checinski, “The Kielce Pogrom: Some Unanswered Questions”; and Checinski, “The Legacy of the Soviet War-Economy and Implications for Gorbachev's Perestroika.”
11 Anonymous (Michael Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism, 1956–1968,” 19.
12 Anonymous (Michael Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 19–20.
13 See, for example, Gross’ account of the changes in Soviet policy towards Jews and Jewish issues during World War II and their impact on attitudes towards Jews in post-World War II Poland. Gross, Fear, 199–212, esp. 211. “The project of tracking down and weeding out the Jews from Soviet institutions conformed to the regime's characteristic modus operandi from the mid-1940's through the mid-1950s.”
14 For examples of this approach, see, Wiesel, The Jews of Silence. Also see, Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone. For a recent journalistic piece which echoes this narrative, see Izabella Tabarovsky, “The Refusnik Exodus from Slavery to Freedom United the Jewish World and Brought Down the Soviet Union,” Tablet, April 8, 2020, accessed on April 16, 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/refusenik-exodus-passover-soviet-union.
15 Dawidowicz, “What Future for Judaism in Russia?” My thanks to Nancy Sinkoff for bringing this source to my attention.
16 On this point, see, Ettinger, “Introduction,” xiv, and Ettinger, “Soviet Antisemitism after the Six-Day War,” 50, 56.
17 Reagan, 1983.
18 On Shamir's remarks, see: “Shamir's Remarks about Poland Held Up Diplomatic Relations,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December, 8, 1989, accessed on April 18, 2020, https://www.jta.org/1989/12/08/archive/shamirs-remarks-about-poland-held-up-diplomatic-relations; and, Joel Brinkley, “Walesa, in Israel, Regrets Poland's Antisemitism,” New York Times, March 21, 1991, accessed on April 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/21/world/walesa-in-israel-regrets-poland-s-anti-semitism.html. My thanks to Gershon Bacon for bringing these sources to my attention.
19 For more on this point, see: Ury, “Who, What, When, Where, and Why Is Polish Jewry?”
20 See, for example, Adam Michnik, “Poland and the Jews,” The New York Review of Books, May 30, 1991, accessed on May 23, 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/05/30/poland-and-the-jews/?pagination=false. For more on this discussion, see Michnik, Przeciw antysemityzmowi, 1936–2009.
21 See, Korzec, “Antisemitism in Poland as an Intelectual [sic], Social, and Political Movement,” 100 and 95, respectively.
22 While the scholarship on this topic is rich and growing, see the following English-language studies: Gutman, “Polish Antisemitism between the Wars: An Overview”; Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland; and, Michlic, Poland's Threatening Other. An unpublished study by Marcin Wodziński notes that sixty-two percent of the articles listed in the Rambi database on Jewish history in Poland that were published between 1990 and 2020 focus on either the Holocaust or antisemitism. Wodziński, “East European Jewish Studies: Chances and Challenges,” unpublished manuscript, 14. My thanks to Prof. Wodziński for sharing with me a draft of this paper.
23 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 24 and 31, respectively. Also see page 21.
24 See, the recent study by Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe.
25 On the charge of Jewish collaboration with Russian occupiers in the early twentieth century, see Ury, Barricades and Banners, 214–60.
26 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 25.
27 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 27.
28 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 28.
29 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 35–6.
30 See, Stola, “Jewish Emigration from Communist Poland: The Decline of Polish Jewry in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” 180.
31 Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners.
32 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 31–2.
33 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 35. Over thirty years later in his memoir, Chechinski echoed a similar opinion that, “the anti-Jewish cleansing in Poland was a copy of the German-Nazi behavior.” Checinski, Running the Gauntlet of Anti-Semitism, 255.
34 Note the place that these and other policies played in Raphael Lemkin's analysis of genocide. See Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide,” 13–14.
35 Anonymous (Checinski), “USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism,” 37. Also see, Checinski, Running the Gauntlet of Anti-Semitism, 257. Note Gross’ somewhat similar conclusion that: “since 1956, when the internal politics of the regime became more transparent, the Security Service emerged as a consistent repository of hard-line anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic xenophobia.” Gross, Fear, 238.
36 See, Slezkine, The Jewish Century; and Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930.
37 See Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews; Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution; and, Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher. For an overview of some of the recent literature on Soviet Jewry, see Litvak, “The New Marranos,” 245–67.
38 See, for example, Brent and Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime; and Rubinstein and Naumov, Stalin's Secret Pogrom. Also see, Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone.
39 See, for example, Dekel-Chen, “Jewish Agricultural Settlement in the Interwar Period.”
40 Note, for example, the colorful work of the artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi who was born in Kiev and moved to Israel at the age of fifteen. Cherkassky-Nnadi, “Pravda,” curator Amitai Mendelsohn, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, January 10 to October 31, 2018, accessed on May 8, 2020, http://rg.co.il/exhibition/pravda/; and, Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi, “Soviet Childhood,” # 1, # 2, # 3, accessed on May 8, 2020, http://rg.co.il/exhibitions/.
41 For additional examples regarding how these issues were addressed at the time, see Korzec, “Antisemitism in Poland”; Lendvai, “Nightmare in Poland,” Anti-Semitism without Jews, chapter two; Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Antisemitism; and also, Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985).
42 See, for example, Krzywiec, Chauvinism, Polish Style; and, Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism.
43 This is a key point in Brykczynski, Primed for Violence. Also see, Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate.
44 Gross, Fear, 192–243; and Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe.
45 Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967–1968; and, Plocker, The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland. Also see, Kichelewski, “Imagining ‘the Jews’ in Stalinist Poland”; and, Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland, 264–312.
46 See, for example, Ury, Barricades and Banners, 214–60.
47 Schatz, The Generation, 288–93, fns. 9, 10, 13, 18.
48 See, Gross, Fear, 199–212. For direct references to Schatz in Gross’ work, see Gross, Fear, 195–6. For Gross's reservations regarding Checinski's interpretation of the anti-Jewish violence in Kielce in 1946, see Gross, Fear, 161.
49 Gross, Fear, 236–7.
50 For more on these developments, see Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry; and, Ury, “Who, What, When, Where and Why Is Polish Jewry?”
51 For background on debates in this field, see Judaken, “So What's New? Rethinking the ‘New Antisemitism’ in a Global Age;” and, Klug, “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism’.”
52 For a discussion regarding the Soviet Union's anti-Zionist and anti-cosmopolitan campaigns before 1967, see Grüner, “‘Russia's Battle Against the Foreign’: The Anti-Cosmopolitanism Paradigm in Russian and Soviet Ideology.”
53 Early works by Wistrich include Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky and Wistrich, Trotsky.
54 Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, 5–6, 27, and, 56–7.
55 Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, 56.
56 For recent critiques of Wistrich, see Judaken, “Introduction,”; Schroeter, “‘Islamic Anti-Semitism’ in Historical Discourse,” 1172–89; and Ury, “Strange Bedfellows?” For examples of works that adopt Wistrich's approach to the study of antisemitism, see Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, xxiv, 8, 97, 357, 359, 441, 483, 538, 583; Rosenfeld, ed., Deciphering the New Antisemitism; and, Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie.
57 For more on this point, see Schroeter, “‘Islamic Anti-Semitism’ in Historical Discourse.”
58 Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession, 3.
59 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002.
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Scott Ury
Scott Ury is Senior Lecturer in Tel Aviv University's Department of Jewish History where he is also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness and Senior Editor of the journal History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. His publications include Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, 2012) and several co-edited volumes on various aspects of modern Jewish history including, Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe (Routledge, 2014) and Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism (Palgrave, 2021).