Title An unchosen people Jewish political reckoning in interwar Poland Kenneth B. Moss

Published Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press 2021 ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 388 pages) illustrations, maps Contents Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Note on Transliteration and Translation -- Map -- Introduction: Unchosen Times, Unchosen Conditions -- 1 Futurelessness and the Jewish Question -- 2 Toward a Politics of Doubt and Exit -- 3 Minorityhood and the Limits of Culture -- 4 Antisemitism, Nationalism, Eliminationism -- 5 From Ideology to Inquiry -- 6 Palestine as Possibility -- 7 Reason, Exit, and Postcommunal Triage -- Conclusion: "With a Cruel Logic" -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index Summary A revisionist account of interwar Europe's largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalism's pathologies, diaspora's fragility, Zionism's promises, and the necessity of choice. What did the future hold for interwar Europe's largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with "no tomorrow." Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalism's collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be found--and for whom. The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a late Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism's terrible potencies, Zionism's promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry's most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves--in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Focusing not on ideals but on a search for realism, Moss recasts the history of modern Jewish political thought. Where much scholarship seeks Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People recovers a darker tradition characterized by painful tradeoffs amid a harrowing political reality, making Polish Jewry a paradigmatic example of the minority experience endemic to the nation-state Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Jews -- Poland -- Identity -- History -- 20th century Jews -- Poland -- Politics and government -- History -- 20th century Jewish nationalism -- Poland -- History -- 20th century Antisemitism -- Poland -- History -- 20th century HISTORY / Jewish Antisemitism Jewish nationalism Jews -- Identity Jews -- Politics and government SUBJECT Poland -- History -- 1918-1945. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85104098 Subject Poland Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 0674269985 9780674269989 9780674269972 0674269977

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