"Jewish Revival" in Poland

[David Goldfarb]

I haven't been to the festival, but I've been to Kazimierz and sampled the
"Jewish" cuisine that my grandparents never tasted, and some of what is
going on there is kitsch, but much of this development is well meaning
despite its awkwardness, not unlike white college students in the US playing
the blues and African-American folk music during the era of the Civil Rights
movement.

In the late 1980s I saw this already happening.  Students from Kraków who
thought of themselves as progressive were very interested in what they could
learn about Jewish culture, and it wasn't unusual to meet people who had
Jewish ancestors and wanted to recover their lost heritage and even convert
to Judaism.  I attended a jazz performance once at a Jewish club in Katowice
in 1989, and they had a few Jewish members with a surprising proportion of
non-Jews who just wanted to learn something and regularly attended events at
the club.

Another side of this was the ritual of several older people telling me on
various occasions, a propos of nothing in particular, that they had a
relative who had hidden Jews during the war, as if my acknowledgment were
particularly important, or perhaps just to let me know that they weren't
anti-semitic--not that it had even occurred to me that they were.
-- 
David A. Goldfarb
http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb

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