{"id":78779,"date":"2020-06-04T17:05:41","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=78779"},"modified":"2020-06-04T07:23:17","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T05:23:17","slug":"13-05-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=78779","title":{"rendered":"How Ewa Kurek, the Favorite Historian of the Polish Far Right, Promotes Her Distorted Account of the Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/img\/tablet.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"35%\" \/><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/news\/articles\/ewa-kurek-favorite-historian-of-the-polish-far-right\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">How Ewa Kurek, the Favorite Historian of the Polish Far Right, Promotes Her Distorted Account of the Holocaust<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>ARMIN ROSEN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\" \/>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/sanity-14b55.kxcdn.com\/images\/z2aip6ei\/production\/26fda7980e5579f812af05f306beabc0b00db751-2560x1060.jpg\" alt=\"Photo: YouTube\" width=\"100%\" \/> <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><span class=\"Hero__caption mr_25 color-gray-darkest text-article-details-xs font-300 graebenbach\">Ewa Kurek.<\/span><span class=\"Hero__credit color-gray text-article-details-xxs font-300 uppercase graebenbach letter-spacing-md\">PHOTO: YOUTUBE<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"article-content-container col-12 xl-wide:col-10 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"lg:mr1_5 lg:pr1_5 Hero__header-container--half-width border-bottom-black flex flex-col items-center\">\n<div class=\"Hero__info-container w100 flex flex-col items-center hauto justify-between\">\n<div class=\"flex flex-col items-center\">\n<div class=\"Hero__section-icon-container\">\n<div>.<\/div>\n<div class=\"Button Button pointer p0 bg-color-transparent linked-border-bottom-red\"><strong style=\"font-size: 1.2em;\">In public events across America, including one attended by a U.S. Congressman, the formerly respected scholar accused rich Jews of plotting with the Nazis to kill their poor brethren and argued that the ghettos were voluntary<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"Hero__date\">.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ArticleView__content article-content-container mxauto text-article-dropcaps\">\n<div class=\"ArticleView__content-switch bradford text-article-body-md font-300 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto text-article-dropcaps\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">On April 10, Poland\u2019s consulate in New York\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/scroll\/259784\/polish-consulate-cancels-award-for-polish-jewish-dialogue\">announced<\/a>\u00a0the cancellation of the Polish-Jewish Dialogue\u2019s annual awards dinner, where the historian Ewa Kurek was scheduled to receive an honor named after Jan Karski, an army officer who risked his life to tell the world about the horrors of Auschwitz and who later became one of Poland\u2019s leading diplomats and elder statesmen. Right-wing non-Jewish participants in the group, which has around 60 members, had nominated Kurek for the award. The Dialogue\u2019s Jews were led to believe that Kurek was a mainstream historian lauded for her extensive use of Jewish sources, and were apparently unfamiliar with her scholarly work and unaware of her actual beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek has argued that the Jews lie about Polish conduct during WWII in order to smear Poland and hide their own people\u2019s duplicity. She\u2019s alleged that Jews forged a separate peace with the Nazis during the occupation of Poland and had happily confined themselves to ghettos for generations before the Germans showed up. She\u2019s accused Poland\u2019s urbanized and assimilated Jews of being Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust, and drawn pointed and creepily essentialist\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3BQO-9nP8a0\">contrasts<\/a>\u00a0between the Jewish and Polish national characters. The award for Kurek was a briefly successful power play among hardline nationalist diasporans in the Dialogue. But Kurek turned out to be too much of an extremist for the Consulate, which was hosting the Karski dinner on its premises but nixed the event once complaints about the recognition for her poured in. Kurek\u2019s award was\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.apnews.com\/2f78a95666b244e7a86f8af9f535a04c\">withdrawn<\/a>\u00a0the day after the cancellation was announced, but not before the Polish-Jewish Dialogue had a plaque made for her.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">That\u2019s not where Ewa Kurek\u2019s adventures in America ended. In Boston, on April 11, at an event at the Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish sponsored by the eastern Massachusetts chapter of the Polish American Congress and the Kluby Gazety Polskiej of Boston, Kurek spun noxious arguments about alleged Jewish complicity in the Holocaust. On April 14, she gave a speech at a conference to commemorate the Smolensk plane crash\u2014the 2010 disaster that killed Poland\u2019s president and other dignitaries\u2014which was held at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa, a center of right-wing Polish diaspora activity in the United States. The event had a number of other far-right participants and sponsors, and also drew Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who stopped by for approximately 15 minutes according to his Capitol Hill office.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Even more jarring is Kurek\u2019s appearance, on April 18, in the downstairs church at the St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Academy in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn\u2014A writer credibly accused of twisting the historical record of the Holocaust to inflame divisions between Poles and Jews gave a talk in a borough where perhaps as many as\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/beta.nydailynews.com\/new-york\/brooklyn\/brooklyn-residents-jews-new-study-finds-article-1.1100080\">one in four residents<\/a>\u00a0are Jewish. All three of Kurek\u2019s speeches were in Polish.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cWhat is particularly alarming,\u201d Mark Weitzman, Director of Government Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a former chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance\u2019s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial said of Kurek\u2019s U.S. speeches, \u201cis the fact that professional anti-Semites and Holocaust distorters are finding audiences and mining U.S. communities for support.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek\u2019s trip around the northeast came at a sensitive moment for relations between Poland and the Jewish world. Earlier this year, a\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/time.com\/5128341\/poland-holocaust-law\/\">law<\/a>\u00a0criminalizing claims of Polish responsibility for the Holocaust sparked a diplomatic confrontation between Poland and Israel while ripping open one of the deepest wounds in both Polish and Jewish history. Kurek\u2019s tour of America shows that the fight over the historical memory of the Holocaust in Poland is taking on a noxious character even in the U.S. As Havi Dreifuss, a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe at Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem put it, \u201cKurek is using the Holocaust and using Jewish history and Polish history in order to spread hate.\u201d For a week in April, she was doing that right here in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek\u2019s highest-profile talk was at the Smolensk commemoration in Doylestown on April 14. A\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/niezalezna.pl\/222228-v-forum-polonijne-w-amerykanskiej-czestochowie-polonia-semper-fidelis-budujmy-wspolny-front-patriotyczny\">flyer<\/a>\u00a0for the event indicates that it was co-sponsored by a number of Polish diaspora groups, including the local chapter of the Polish American Congress, the Coalition of Polish Americans, and the Slavic Federal Credit Union. One notable co-sponsor included the Perth Amboy, New Jersey-based Friends of Radio Maryja, which supports a far-right Polish radio station that the U.S. State Department\u2019s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/2001-2009.state.gov\/g\/drl\/rls\/rm\/2008\/100180.htm\">called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cone of Europe\u2019s most blatantly anti-Semitic media venues,\u201d and whose anti-Semitism is so plentiful that the outlet has en entire dedicated\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.adl.org\/blog\/radio-maryja-25-years-of-anti-semitism\">page<\/a>\u00a0on the Anti-Defamation League\u2019s website. Friends of Radio Marijya is also a member of the\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.klubygp.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/DTrump.pdf\">Smolensk Disaster Commemoration Committee<\/a>, the group most directly responsible for organizing the Doylestown event. The Committee also includes the Gazeta Polska\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.klubygp.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/DTrump.pdf\">clubs<\/a>\u00a0of New Jersey, New York City, and Philadelphia.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">John Czop, the treasurer of the Smolensk Committee and the director of policy planning for the national-level Polish American Congress, said that Kurek discussed a \u201cHasidic Jewish poet\u201d during her talk who supposedly \u201cclaimed that the Polish state had nothing to do with the mass murder of Polish Jewry.\u201d The assertion of official Polish blamelessness for the Holocaust was \u201cthe gist of Kurek\u2019s remarks,\u201d Czop said. Czop specified that the Committee \u201cnever wrote a check to Ewa Kurek\u201d for her appearance. \u201cShe has a lot of wealthy friends in the United States,\u201d he added.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek appeared on a panel with Marek Jan Chodakiewcz of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for World Politics, who argued that Poland bore little responsibility for the 1968 anti-Semitic purges that resulted in the expulsion of many of the country\u2019s remaining Jews. \u201cChodakiewcz delivered a lecture on March 1968 in Poland about how the accusation of anti-Semitism leveled at the Polish nation and the Polish people was manufactured and was a creation of Soviet propaganda. The Kremlin wanted to purge the Polish Communist Party of one faction and put the other faction into power,\u201d Czop recalled of Chodakiewcz\u2019s talk. In a Polish-language\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.fronda.pl\/a\/prof-marek-jan-chodakiewicz-marcowe-knucie,105965.html\">article<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year, Chokadiewcz fretted that the purges would likely be viewed through the prism of Polish anti-Semitism during their upcoming 50th anniversary, and claimed that it was trans-national communists and not Poles who brought about the expulsions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">When reached for comment by email, Chodakiewcz clarified that his speech covered \u201cSoviet policy toward Israel before and after the stunning Jewish victory in 1967. I argued that virtually EVERY major policy was imposed by Moscow and\/or vetted by it. I showed how the Six Day War triggered an anti-Jewish propaganda offensive first in the Soviet press. And I explained how the purge in 1968 started at the top: Polish ethnic and other Communists targeted the Communists of Jewish origin, and then the operation spread down, impacting regular folks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek was not the only participant in the Smolensk commemoration with a history of problematic statements about Jews. In 2002, Antoni Macierewicz, a former defense minister who headed a parliamentary inquiry into the Smolensk disaster,\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2015\/nov\/10\/polish-defence-minister-condemned-over-jewish-conspiracy-theory\">told<\/a>\u00a0Radio Maryja that he thought the\u00a0<em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/em>, while possibly fake, might still be an accurate reflection of reality. Jan Zaryn, who was also listed as attending the event, is a far-right parliamentarian who introduced a resolution denying most Polish responsibility for the 1968\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dw.com\/en\/poland-marks-50-years-since-1968-anti-semitic-purge\/a-42877652\">purges<\/a>, and has called for the\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/dorzeczy.pl\/kraj\/56728\/Gross-do-prokuratury-Zaryn-Tak-jezeli-powtorzy-klamliwe-tezy.html\">prosecution<\/a>\u00a0of the Princeton Holocaust historian Jan Tomasz Gross.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">There were more mainstream figures in attendance too. Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick made a brief appearance, although his Washington office claimed that he did not stick around for the panel discussions and was not familiar with Kurek, Zaryn, or Friends of Radio Maryja. Czop said that a representative from the Polish Consulate in New York was in attendance as well, and the Consulate confirmed to Tablet that vice consul Mateusz Gmura went to the event.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Weitzman said he worried that Fitzpatrick may have \u201cpassively legitimized the event,\u201d even if the congressman didn\u2019t know anything about Kurek or the conference\u2019s other participants. \u201cIf someone appears on a platform with David Duke or Richard Spencer or Louis Farrakhan, they have to accept responsibility for that,\u201d Weitzman said, adding that he considers Kurek to be roughly analogous to them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In Czop\u2019s view, Kurek is a serious historian whose work is methodologically rigorous. \u201cShe\u2019s done careful research in resources in Israel and in Poland, so she needs to be taken seriously,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Chodakiewcz defended Kurek\u2019s scholarship, even though he said he didn\u2019t agree with all of it. \u201c[F]or a very long time her scholarship was admired,\u201d he wrote. \u201cShe did solid work on rescue during the Holocaust, in particular in convents and monasteries.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">According to Kurek\u2019s\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jedwabne-ekshumacja.org\/dr-ewa-kurek-cv\/\">online CV<\/a>, she has presented papers at Princeton and at a 1988 conference at Yad Vashem. Czop said that the first time he saw Kurek speak was at Columbia University in 2007, in a talk introducing the arguments from her\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Polish-Jewish-Relations-1939-1945-Beyond-Solidarity\/dp\/1475938314\">book<\/a>\u00a0<em>Jewish-Polish Relations 1939-1945: Beyond the Limits of Solidarity<\/em>. In the speech, Czop recalled, Kurek argued that \u201cPolish Jewry tried to get an autonomy arrangement from Nazi Germany similar to the autonomy arrangement that they had been trying to work out with the Polish state.\u201d According to Czop, Kurek claimed that \u201cat least until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941\u2026Nazi policy towards Polish Jewry was essentially one of having them govern themselves in their own ghettos.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">This is an odd definition of self-governance\u2014but it was offered at an event held at an Ivy League institution, by an author of nine books with a PhD from the Catholic University of Lublin. Kurek studied under the late Polish foreign minister and Holocaust survivor\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/translate.google.com\/translate?hl=en&amp;sl=pl&amp;u=https:\/\/wpolityce.pl\/polityka\/380892-nasz-wywiad-dr-kurek-spory-w-relacjach-polski-z-izraelem-opartych-na-klamstwie-i-uleglosci-musialy-kiedys-wybuchnac-wlasnie-wybuchly%3Fstrona%3D2&amp;prev=search\">Wladyslaw Bartoszewski<\/a>, and the forward to her 1992 book<em>\u00a0Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945<\/em>, was\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/searchworks.stanford.edu\/view\/3303794\">written<\/a>\u00a0by none other than Jan Karski (Last month, Karski\u2019s literary executor\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fakt.pl\/wydarzenia\/polska\/lublin\/dr-ewa-kurek-z-humanitarna-nagrode-im-jana-karskiego-kaja-mirecka-ploss\/8cf1pbm\">strongly objected<\/a>\u00a0to Kurek being given the Dialogue\u2019s award).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">To her critics, Kurek\u2019s credentials are part of what makes her such an alarming figure. She is an expert in the very historical record she\u2019s accused of twisting: Because she gives consideration to Jewish sources, has had multiple books translated into English, and displays a bland professorial evenness during her public appearances, a typical listener might not be able to detect any bad faith lurking behind her words. She is maybe the only legitimate Holocaust scholar to have become an alleged Holocaust revisionist or distorter during a later phase of her career. When asked for potential precedents, David Silberklang, the editor-in-chief of Yad Vashem Studies and a leading expert on the Holocaust in Poland, could only think of the British Holocaust denier David Irving, who lacked Kurek\u2019s extensive formal credentials and was never taken seriously as an academic historian.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><em>Your Life Is Worth Mine<\/em>, the\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Your-Life-Worth-Mine-German-Occupied\/dp\/0781804094\">book<\/a>\u00a0for which she is still best known, recounted Polish nuns\u2019 efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Experts have noted some\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.yadvashem.org\/righteous\/resources\/rescue-of-jewish-children-in-polish-convents.html\">odd methodological choices\u00a0<\/a>in the book, which is based almost entirely on the memoirs of the nuns themselves and might have overestimated the extent to which Polish orders protected Jewish children during the war. \u201cOutside of Poland the book was not considered to be top-notch scholarship,\u201d said Silberklang. Yet to certain ears\u2014and to people who wouldn\u2019t necessarily know better\u2014Kurek does not sound like an ideological extremist, but a fair-minded scholar who bases her work on historical evidence that Poland\u2019s Jews themselves left behind.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cWhen you hear what was published by her and in her name in the last few weeks or months, you can see that the problem is not that she doesn\u2019t know the history\u2014she knows the historical facts. But she is distorting them,\u201d said Dreifuss.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Katka Reszke, a Polish-born writer, artist, and Jewish educator who attended Kurek\u2019s April 11 talk in Boston, said that Kurek has a favorite rhetorical trick: She\u2019ll quote a contemporaneous`Jewish source, like a diary or a letter, as if it is the final word on a given topic and without providing any context that would complicate the historical narrative she is trying to construct. This tactic enables her to use Jews\u2019 own words to confirm a hardline Polish nationalist narrative of the Holocaust, while also making Kurek herself appear broad-minded and evidentially rigorous. \u201cShe does this great job of quoting the sources that she wants to quote while not quoting other sources,\u201d said Reszke. \u201cBut as a historian who has clearly read a lot about this, she\u2019s obviously also read the stuff she doesn\u2019t want to quote.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Silberklang had a similarly unsparing verdict on Kurek\u2019s work. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t deny that Nazi Germany wanted to kill the Jews and that Jews were killed. She\u2019s not a Holocaust denier in that sense,\u201d he said. \u201cBut she distorts things so radically and so egregiously that she\u2019s basically in the realm of Holocaust denial, or at least extreme distortion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Based on her April 18 speech in Greenpoint, which is partially available on\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tdtCeH2voFk\">YouTube<\/a>, this is a defensible statement. According to Zygmunt Staszewski, a member of the Polish-Jewish dialogue who helped nominate Kurek for the Jan Karski prize, the Brooklyn talk was planned by Witold Rosowski, a journalist and activist known in Polish diaspora circles for his staunch right-wing views. Rosowski moderated the\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rfh4gmyYdKE\">question-and-answer period<\/a>\u00a0at the Greenpoint talk and sat at a front table during her\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KasUD8QrnDI\">speech<\/a>. When reached by email, Rosowski said he \u201chelped to ensure the location for Dr. Ewa Kurek\u2019s lecture in Greenpoint.\u201d He said the talk was organized by \u201cjust a few people\u201d and wasn\u2019t sponsored by any organization.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">During the Greenpoint event, Kurek made the incendiary claim that Poland\u2019s urbanized and assimilated Jews took advantage of the Nazi occupation in order to help exterminate the country\u2019s Hasidic population, whom Poland\u2019s more educated Jews hated. \u201cA few assimilated Jews survived the war: Some doctors or lawyers who during the war were most often members of the Jewish police and murdered Hasidim,\u201d she said. The \u201cenlightened elite\u201d of Polish Jewry\u2014most of whom survived the conflict because of their willingness to work with the Nazis, according to Kurek\u2014had decided that \u201cthe rabble must perish.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kurek drifted into similarly odd territory when discussing the communist period during her Greenpoint speech, making liberal use of the phrase \u201c\u017cydokomuna\u201d\u2014a loaded term that vaguely translates to \u201cJudeo-communism\u201d\u2014while claiming that much of the Jewish population in Poland today is descended from Jews who arrived with the Red Army at the tail-end of WWII.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Rosowski does not believe Kurek is an anti-Semite. If anything, he wrote, she is \u201ca philo-Semite since she presented a great interest in Jewish history, culture and faith in her life\u2026There are very few people like her.\u201d He said he was involved in organizing the Greenpoint speech because Kurek \u201cis quite famous in Poland,\u201d partly as a result of the controversies surrounding the country\u2019s Holocaust law. \u201cThe alleged anti- Semitism of Dr. Kurek is probably coming from her telling the details of Ghetto in Lodz, where Chaim Rumkowski, as the Jewish commandant of the Ghetto, had a big role in sending Jews to German concentration camps,\u201d Rososwki wrote. \u201cShe also stays firm, as have all Polish and Polish- Americans, defending the new law\u2014stating that the death camps were German, built by Germans on the invaded and occupied territory of former Poland.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">As Rosowski suggests, many Poles resent being blamed for a German crime committed on their land. But Kurek\u2019s recent career shows how legitimate grievances can spark much darker impulses. Reszke, the Polish-born author who attended Kurek\u2019s speech at a church in Boston on April 11\u2014the night of Yom HaShoah\u2014 explained that one of the eeriest things about the talk came from what she intuited about the other 50 or so people in the room, who might not have borne any specific ill will toward Jews and whose sense of hurt at slanders against the Polish people was sincerely felt. \u201cThe people that listen to her and that read her books don\u2019t realize the manipulation behind it,\u201d said Reszke. \u201cThey take it at face value and it perpetuates some feelings that they might have and also strengthens this idea that all Jews hate them.\u201d At Kurek\u2019s talk, Reszke said, she could see how seamlessly hatred could be repackaged into a normative worldview that people wouldn\u2019t consciously question. \u201cI think there\u2019s danger in perpetuating anti-Semitism that doesn\u2019t see itself as anti-Semitism,\u201d she added, reflecting on the event. She left the talk wondering \u201chow many decades or centuries\u201d it would take to bridge the divisions on display.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Reszke recorded the entirety of Kurek\u2019s speech, and took copious notes. Kurek\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KasUD8QrnDI\">returned<\/a>\u00a0to the idea that urbanized Jews had aided the Nazis in wiping out most of Poland\u2019s Jewish population: \u201cI\u2019m telling you about the scale of Jewish collaboration in the murder of Jews. Collaboration in the murders and in the catching of Jews and in deporting them was overwhelming,\u201d Kurek reportedly said\u2014\u201cshe keeps reporting that it\u2019s all in Jewish sources,\u201d Reszke added.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">\u201cWho survived?\u201d Kurek continued, according to Reszke. \u201cJewish policeman, doctors from the ghetto infirmaries who didn\u2019t cure people but sent them to their death. Such beasts survived and these beasts created the little tale to obscure the truth about what really happened.\u201d That \u201ctale\u201d refers to the widely accepted narrative about the Holocaust, which tends to assign some measure of guilt to societies that either aided in the purge of their Jews or did little to actually halt the carnage. \u201cMost of the time it sounded like she was coming to the defense of the Germans more than the Poles,\u201d Reszke observed. After all, \u201cshe\u2019s speaking to a crowd that\u2019s already convinced the Poles had nothing to do with any of the murders.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\" style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Reszke did not necessarily plan on confronting Kurek. But she said she had come to her speech out of a sense of moral obligation, both to record Kurek\u2019s statements and to challenge them if the opportunity arose. Toward the end of the talk, Kurek returned to another of her more controversial claims: The idea that Jews had chosen to live in the ghettos during WWII, which afforded protection from the chaos of wartime Poland. \u201cAs I was sitting there listening to this babble I kept saying to myself: Don\u2019t say anything, don\u2019t say anything, don\u2019t speak, because it\u2019s really not going to go down very well\u2026In a way, I don\u2019t remember making a conscious decisions to speak. I just heard myself talking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">How, Reszke asked towards the end of the event amid an increasingly hostile crowd, does Kurek understand the fact that the Warsaw Ghetto was walled, with watchtowers to prevent people from leaving? Is that the sign of a happy and voluntary social arrangement? \u201cI say: So you\u2019re saying it was the Jewish community\u2019s idea to build a wall around the Warsaw ghetto? She said yes. Then she called me a young, undereducated little person and the crowd applauded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Reszke approached Kurek when the talk ended. Kurek asked for her business card. Reszke then tried to give Kurek an idea of the damage she was doing to the already fragile relationship between Jews and Poles. \u201cI told her that I\u2019ve lived in the States for over ten years and I\u2019ve actually been doing quite a lot of work in my writing and in my public speaking talking about Poland today and the Jewish community in Poland and how things aren\u2019t as bad as a lot of people think, and how there\u2019s renewal and there\u2019s Jewish life there\u2014and now it\u2019s because of people like you that I have a problem.\u201d According to Reszke, all Kurek could say in response was a sharp \u201cgoodbye.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><em>Tablet intern Theo Canter contributed reporting to this article<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Armin Rosen<\/strong> is a staff writer for Tablet magazine.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\" \/>\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Ewa Kurek, the Favorite Historian of the Polish Far Right, Promotes Her Distorted Account of the Holocaust ARMIN ROSEN Ewa Kurek.PHOTO: YOUTUBE . In public events across America, including one attended by a U.S. Congressman, the formerly respected scholar accused rich Jews of plotting with the Nazis to kill their poor brethren and argued [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78779"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78779"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78798,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78779\/revisions\/78798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}