Professor Stola, director of the Polin Museum, will discuss the history of Polish Jews, and how Poland has reckoned with the history of the Holocaust.
Emerging from decades of communist distortion and marginalization of the Holocaust in public memory, Poland seemed determined come to terms with its past. Several major debates on Polish roles in and responses to the Holocaust engaged public opinion, prompting official statements from State and Church leaders, and other public figures. In addition, new monuments and museum exhibitions appeared, as did relevant works by writers, filmmakers, and artists. All of these efforts were bolstered by Holocaust research by new generation of Polish scholars. Recent years have seen a backlash that includes attempts to criminalize points of view that do not fit with glorious visions of national history. The memory of the Shoah thus remains a battlefield in the culture wars that divide Poland.
Dariusz Stola is a historian and a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published ten books and more than 100 articles on the history of Polish-Jewish relations, the Holocaust, international migrations and communist regime, as well as on Polish debates about these pasts. He has been the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland since 2014.
This event is co-sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University.
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