Letters, Spring 2025

Delayed Ratification

Richard Kreitner’s review of Adam Jortner’s excellent book (“Dusting Off the Old Stories,” Winter 2025) about Jews and the American Revolution contains an unfortunate error. In describing the postponement of New York’s Grand Federal Procession in July 1788, Kreitner mistakenly describes the New York procession as a “celebration” of the ratification of the Constitution. To the contrary, New York had not ratified the Constitution yet. There was strong opposition to ratification in the New York convention, led by the state’s powerful governor, George Clinton, and the Federalists scheduled the procession to put pressure on the divided convention to ratify. Thus the decision to postpone it was potentially a costly political decision that could have jeopardized the prospect of ratification in a key state. This circumstance underscores Professor Jortner’s argument that the postponement demonstrated the high standing of New York’s small Jewish community after the Revolution.

Michael Schwartz
South Salem, NY
via email

Pain Points

I am writing in response to Emil Stern’s review of A Real Pain (“The Big Schlep,” Winter 2025). While the reviewer raises some valid points about the complexities of Jewish-Polish relations, the review itself falls into problematic oversimplification and selective historical framing. Let me be clear: Antisemitism was and remains a serious problem in Poland, as it does throughout Europe and indeed globally. However, the common portrayal of Poland as somehow uniquely or especially antisemitic is historically inaccurate and reflects a troubling bias. The reality is that antisemitism exists everywhere, and it’s everywhere unacceptable. Poland is neither more nor less antisemitic than other European nations—though it is often uniquely stigmatized as such. This stigmatization ignores the crucial historical context that prewar Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, comprising nearly 3.3 million people. This wasn’t coincidental—for centuries, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been the center of Jewish life, culture, and scholarship precisely because it offered better conditions and more freedoms for Jews than most other European countries. The very existence of such a large, vibrant Jewish community in Eastern Europe testifies to this reality.

The review’s emphasis on Polish complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust reflects a troubling double standard in how we discuss different nations’ wartime histories. While collaboration occurred throughout Europe, we rarely see French or Dutch people categorically labeled as antisemites, despite significant collaboration in both countries. This selective emphasis is particularly striking given that Eastern Europeans faced an automatic death sentence for helping Jews, while Western Europeans did not. For example, among the four people helping Anne Frank and her family, two faced brief imprisonment and two were released without punishment. Despite these unprecedented risks, more Righteous Among the Nations hail from Poland than any other country.

Regarding property restitution, the review singles out Poland while ignoring that every European nation has struggled with this issue. The complexity of restitution in a country that was itself decimated by war, then subjected to decades of Soviet control, deserves more nuanced treatment than the review provides. Perhaps most troublingly, the review seems to suggest that contemporary Poland should exist primarily as a memorial to past tragedies. This perspective reveals its own blind spots. Those who criticize Poles for living in formerly Jewish homes rarely examine their own relationship to indigenous lands in the Americas or consider parallel situations in Israel and Palestine, where similar displacement issues exist. This selective moral accounting undermines the credibility of their critique.

The most egregious sentence in the review attempts to connect the Polish Film Institute (and its funding of the movie) with the former PiS government’s amendment of the Institute of National Remembrance law in early 2018. So many in the Jewish community in the US, Canada, and Israel believe that it is now illegal to “talk about the Holocaust” in Poland. This is obviously not true. Nor is it illegal—or even difficult—to publish or talk publicly about instances of Polish complicity and collaboration. It should be noted that the amendment was struck down as unconstitutional and is presently a dead letter. The text stated plainly that no one could accuse Poles or Poland of crimes that were committed by the Germans (or other totalitarians) against the facts. Taken literally, then, any other case in which Poles were involved would not be subject to the punishments laid out in the law. There was also a carve out for any academic or artistic work to be exempted from potential prosecution. Nonetheless, the point was clearly to scare people like Professor Barbara Engelking and her research group. But the outcry against it was so strong that it quietly died a natural death. However, the fact that this law is not in force never made the English-language news.

Moreover, this connection between the Polish Film Institute and the (irrelevant) 2018 law would be like someone connecting projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with Speaker Mike Johnson’s public comments on LGBTQ+ issues. I don’t think anyone would ever make that connection, but somehow for Poland it’s acceptable.

None of my comments here are meant to diminish the horror of the Holocaust or the reality of antisemitism as well as Holocaust negationism. But historical accuracy requires acknowledging both the dark and light in this shared history while avoiding broad generalizations about anyone. It also requires consistency in how we judge historical culpability and contemporary responsibilities without regard for origin.

Dr. Zachary Mazur
Chief Specialist, Historian
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Emil Stern Responds:

In Dr. Zachary Mazur’s response to my review of A Real Pain, he seems most alarmed that the article focuses on Poland and not somewhere else. The article focuses on Poland because the movie is set in Poland—set there because Poland is “where the Holocaust was perpetrated,” in the words of University of Ottawa historian Dr. Jan Grabowski. Bringing up other countries, as Mazur seems to wish I’d done, would be an odd move. Perhaps as jarring as, well, when Mazur brings up “Israel and Palestine”—an attempt to muddy the waters and show that sad things happen everywhere. They do, I suppose, but the characters in the film aren’t going everywhere; they are going to see where their Jewish grandmother lived and what she survived—Poland.

Mazur’s letter notwithstanding, other European countries’ shameful wartime pasts are actually quite well documented in contemporary film. Steve McQueen’s monumental documentary Occupied City, released in 2023, overlays contemporary footage of Amsterdam with a voiceover account of the city’s wartime history. Recent narrative films like the 2010 Sarah’s Key deal with French complicity in the Holocaust. But films made in Poland in recent years seem to have taken a different path. As Daniel Kipnis has noted, The Zone of Interest, another prominent film partly funded by the Polish Film Institute, mysteriously came to include a scene of Polish heroism that was not present in the original Martin Amis novel, while its Jews remained off camera.

Dr. Grabowski puts the number of Jews killed by Poles in WWII at a not-inconsiderable two hundred thousand. Imagine if the characters had discussed this in A Real Pain as they walked through Warsaw’s beautiful parks. Perhaps they would have better understood their own anxiety. Or if they had quoted Polish writer Kazimierz Wyka on the topic of Jewish real estate assumed by Poles: “For the Germans, all the blame. For us—the keys and the cash.” The scene at the grandmother’s house might have felt quite different—real, you might say—if it had really grappled with history.