The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish 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.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on March 2, 2022.

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Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements.

During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of material assistance and propaganda. The defendants and their supporters in Nazi Germany were able to rely on an extensive network that had been established in the early 1920s to combat “Judaeo-Bolshevism.” This conspiratorial “Antisemitic International” united German völkisch circles, Italian fascists, Russian monarchists, and French conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the plaintiffs actively sought to expose the “Protocols” as a forgery in the hope that this would counteract their impact.

In this lecture, Michael Hagemeister will use the Bern trial as a case study of Jewish legal self-defense in order to shed light on both the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the concerted efforts against the “Antisemitic International” in the 1930s, which have received little attention from historians.

Read more about Michael Hagemeister's research on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This lecture originally took place on April 10, 2024.

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In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish schools with strong ties to Jewish socialism and the labor movement, Hebraist schools promoting political and cultural Zionism, and religious schools that retained--or innovated upon--traditionalist educational models reflected different opinions for what Jewish children in interwar Poland would need in the present to secure their future.

In this lecture, Elena Hoffenberg draws upon materials held by YIVO to explore how projections about the future in terms of work, culture, and politics guided parents, educational activists, and young people themselves. Choices as reflections of competing political and religious commitments, as well as material constraints, to better understand what Polish Jews expected for their individual and communal futures.

This lecture originally took place on March 2, 2026.

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