Tangled Up in Poland

Professor Michael Steinlauf will talk with Professor Marci Shore about his recently published book, This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History. A dialogue with Polish historian Elżbieta Janicka, This Was Not America traces Steinlauf’s political and intellectual life from the Brighton Beach kitchens of Holocaust survivors in the 1950s to the Columbia University sit-ins of 1968, and later from the Solidarity movement in Poland of the 1980s to the wrenching debates about Polish complicity in the Holocaust that followed Solidarity’s victory and communism’s collapse. The book chronicles, too, the lives of his Polish Jewish parents, who survived the Holocaust, and the life of the author’s younger half-brother, who did not. Woven throughout the dialogue is a sometimes furious argument with Janicka about antisemitism, guilt, and the meaning of Polish-Jewish history.

Michael Steinlauf is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust as well as numerous studies of Jewish culture in prewar Poland. He was one of the founders of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Currently he is completing studies of the Polish Jewish dramatist Mark Arnshteyn and the Yiddish culture hero Y. L. Peretz.

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