The article is devoted to the pro-Polish integrationist group, an important part of the modernizing section of the Jewish community in Poland, in the second half of the 19th century. The author focuses on Ojczyzna, a Polish-language bulletin and the first regular Polish-language newspaper of the pro-Polish integrationist group in Galicia. The study is an attempt to show how the idea of integration was finally abandoned at the turn of the century, and integration ceased to be seen as the solution to “the Jewish question.”

The article summarizes and highlights some sections of the autobiography of Abraham Stub, a Jew born in Bobowa into a family of adherents of the Bobower Rebbe. In his early childhood Stub migrated with his parents to Mainz in Germany, later escaping the Shoah to Palestine, where he managed to establish a store in the center of West Jerusalem (Ma‛ayan Stub). The autobiography, written in Hebrew, was until recently unknown, although it contains interesting information about the relationship of Jews from Bobowa with their home town after migration, as well as transmitting remarkable biographical details about Rebbe Ben Zion Halberstam’s life in Bobowa. Stub depicts himself as a traditional Jew who during and after World War I and his service in the Austrian army became more and more a religious Zionist. His book thus also provides many insights into the early development of the Mizrahi movement in Germany, where Jews from Eastern Europe, especially from Galicia, were often discriminated against by German Jews and therefore established their own small prayer circles (Mahzike ha-das). Stub’s life story developed from this traditional Hasidic Diaspora background into a typical religious Zionist, so to speak Israeli orthodox biography. It might serve as an example for further studies about migration from the East to the West and further on to Israel, where Jews from Poland or a Polish background still play a dominant role in the political and religious public sphere.

This article discusses the Bund’s gender politics present in Tsukunft, the youth organization of the party. In the interwar period Tsukunft grew into one of the most active and dynamic organizations within the Bundist movement in Poland. The author analyzes Tsukunft’s discourse to find out the actual position of the women in the organization. By confronting the organization’s material with the sources produced by the movement’s women activists, the author tries to find out more about women’s experience in Tsukunft. The article therefore incorporates the marginalized narrative of and on Jewish women into modern historiography.

The article examines Yiddish-Polish writers’ response to the Holocaust in their poetry written in the years 1941-1948 and published in Poland in the early postwar years, when the country enjoyed relative political freedom. Special attention is given to a highly interesting theme appearing in the wartime lyrics written by Jewish survivors in the East (like B. Heller, H. Rubin, R. Żhikhlinsky, A. Zak), i.e. their call to arms addressed to the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Poland. The refugees could not bear the thought that whole masses of Jews died without putting up a fight in the ghettoes and camps in the West. It was probably this helplessness that evolved into their poetic appeal addressed to their ghettoized brethren, their call for resistance and punishment of the Nazi German murderers. Interestingly, the works of some writers who survived in the ghettos (such as Y. Shpigl, Y. Katsenelson and others), prove that ghettoized Jews who were tormented by the “docile death” complex also dreamed about being involved in an armed struggle against the Nazi Germans, but were aware of their weakness in the face of a much stronger enemy. Immediately after the war, this discrepancy of experience and knowledge led to a serious lack of understanding between those Jews who had survived in Poland and those who had survived in the East. The article examines these difference of experiences as it is reflected in the poetry.

After an overview of the historiography of North African Jews, the article presents Dario Miccoli’s book Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s, published in 2015. In this recent study, the author proposes an interesting thesis on the construction of the collective identity of Egyptian Jews in line with the “bourgeoisie” reference model, idealized regardless of the objective reality of their economic condition. Based on archival and literary sources of the time, individual trajectories and social practices, but also social, political and cultural broader contexts are analyzed to outline the construction of this unique collective imagination that has survived in the diaspora.