Przyslal Jacek Schatz

Day I, December 1, 2019
9:00-10:00 Conference registration
10:00 – 12:00
How Jewish are Leftist Ideas? How Leftist is Jewishness

Jakob Stürmann, Freie Universität Berlin
Pavel Axelrod – Eastern European Socialist and “Role Model” for Jewish Socialists during the Inter-War Period?
Alexandra Kemmerer, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law, Heidelberg/Berlin
Poland’s Forgotten Eagle: Rosa Luxemburg – Martyr, Icon, Marginalized Theorist of Revolution
Katarzyna Chmielewska, Polish Academy of Sciences
The Family Communist Rhizome

10:00-12:00
Internationalist Politics, Transnational Biographies, Local Action

Zoé Grumberg, Sciences Po Paris
Yiddish-Speaking Jewish Communists from Poland in Paris: Social and Political Trajectories from the 1920s to the 1960s
Ebony Nilsson, University of Sydney, Australia
A ‘Pied Piper of Discontent’ Among Workers and a ‘Broken-Hearted Communist’: the Transnational Lives and Politics of Polish-Born Jewish Left-Wing Activists in Australia
Daniel Walkowitz, New York University
The Bund Milieu: The Polish-Jewish Left-Wing Diaspora, From Łódź and Białystok to Paterson, New Jersey

12:00-12:30 coffee break
12:30-14:30
Social and Cultural Activism

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw
Being a Jewish birth controller in interwar and state-socialist Poland: the story of Herman Rubinraut (Henryk Babiniak)
Andrea Feldman, University of Zagreb
The Circle of Vera Ehrlich Stein: Jewish Leftist Activists in the Interwar Yugoslavia
Vassili Schedrin, Queen’s University
Solomon Mikhoels: Unwritten Autobiography

12:30-14:30
Antifascism Facing the Holocaust

Stefan Gąsiorowski, Jagiellonian University / Polish Academy of Sciences
Saved by Socialism? PPS Threads in the Life of Michał Borwicz (1911-1987)
Michał Trębacz, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Szmul Zygielbojm. Bundist in Polish London, 1942-1943
Maria Ferenc, University of Warsaw / Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
Shmuel Breslaw – Unacknowledged Intellectual Leader of Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto

14:30-15:30 lunch

15:30 – 17:30
Exclusion and Inclusion in Leftist Jewish Biographies

Dariusz Zalega, independent scholar
Zygmunt Glücksman – Above Nations
Wojciech Goslar, Fundacja Historii Społecznej
Jew, Worker, Anarchist. The Experience of Exclusion in Late Nineteenth-Century Austrian Galicia on an Example of Maurycy Jeger’s Biography.
Anna Ładowska, University of Wrocław

Dina Blond as a Second-Generation Activist in Bund
15:30 – 17:30
After the Holocaust Towards a Brighter Future?

Magdalena Semczyszyn, Institute of National Remembrance
Aba Kowner and Icchak Cukierman – Two Views on the Future of Zionists in Communist Poland in 1944.”
Anna Nedlin Lehrer, Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg
The Founders of the Dror Kibbuz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters Kibbuz) and the Formation of Their Group Identity

17:30-18:00 coffee break
18:00-20:00 Keynote lecture, Karen Auerbach, University of North Carolina

Day II, December 2, 2019
9:00-11:00

Negotiating Religion and Socialism

Gershon Bacon, Bar-Ilan University
Orthodox Jews, Ambivalent Leftists: the Case of Poalei Agudat Yisrael in Interwar Poland
Yitzchak Schwartz, New York University
Pious Radicals? Biographical Sketched of Lived Religion Between Poland, Ukraine and New Jersey in the Am Olam Agricultural Colonies, 1881-1924
Ada Gebel, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Breuer, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Orlean, and Karl Marx: Did All Three Follow the Same Path?

9:00-11:00

Jewish Perspectives on the history of the Left – Marxist Approaches on Jewish History

Piotr Laskowski, University of Warsaw
The monument of failed dreams. Mojżesz Kaufman as a revolutionary and a historian
Tom Navon, University of Haifa and Yad Ya’ari
Raphael Mahler: The History of Polish Jews from a Marxist-Zionist Perspective
Tomasz Siewierski, Polish Academy of Sciences
In the Merging World of History and Politics: Feliks Tych (1929-2015) – Scholar and Participant

11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:30
Responsibility

Stanisław Krajewski, University of Warsaw
How Jewish Were My Communist Ancestors? Revisiting the Question of Jewish Responsibility
Katarzyna Rembacka, Institute of National Remembrance
Leonard Borkowicz’s Ideological Choices and His Autobiographical Settlement with Communism
Katarzyna Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz, Agora Publishing House, Marcin Moskalewicz, Oxford University
Helena Wolińska and Włodzimierz Brus – a Political Biography

11:30-13:30
Emancipatory Empowerment and Leftist Politics

Emma Zohar, The Hebrew University
Communism, Gender and Emotions in the Autobiographies of Bina Garncarska-Kadari and Ester Rosenthal-Schneiderman
Jan Rybak, University of York
A Revolutionary Woman’s Self-Emancipation: Malke Schorr’s Childhood and Youth in Lwów
Magdalena Grabowska, Polish Academy of Sciences
Edwarda Orłowska: Activist, Politician, a Feminist?

13:30-14:30 lunch
14:30-15:50
Different Generations? Different Biographies?

Jaff Schatz, independent researcher, Lund, Sweden
Determinants, Contingencies, Chances: The Paths to the Interwar Communist Movement
Łukasz Bertram, University of Warsaw
Youth, Underground and Power. Polish Communists of Jewish Origin and the Tensions of the Revolutionary Habitus 14:30-15:50
Making sense of Leftist Biographies

Elena Hoffenberg, University of Haifa
Who Were the Bundists? An Analysis of the Movement as Presented in Jacob Sholem Hertz’s Doyres Bundistn (1956)
Eryk Krasucki, University of Szczecin
References to the “World of the Past” in Biographical Sources Concerning the Elite of the KPP Leadership with Jewish Roots

16:30-18:00 Round Table: Jewish Leftwing Activism and Family History:
Participants: Alex Sobel (Leeds, UK) & Leopold Sobel (Lund, Sweden), Ewa Herbst (Edgewater NJ, USA), David Slucki (Charlston, USA)
Chair: Antony Polonsky
18:30-20:30 Film “Tonia and her Children” (by Marcel Łoziński) and discussion (open for the public)