Antisemitic discourse is a constant element of public debate in Poland, yet it undergoes changes that reflect the debate’s dynamics. As the debate shifts directions, goals and the repertoire of social actors admitted to its mainstream, antisemitic discourse as a part of it is also transformed. Its visibility is determined by interdependent periods of intensification and quiet, and its types are a specific response to symbolic struggles between different elite groups.
This presentation is an attempt at a critical description of the place of antisemitic discourse in public debate in Poland over the last quarter century. Beginning with the controversy over Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors and the subsequent discussions related to Polish participation in the Holocaust, moving through political and religious instrumentalizations of antisemitic prejudices and arriving at new-media normalizations of pseudo-populist forms of stigmatizing Jews, I place the problem of antisemitism within one of the axial dimensions of public debate after 1989 — namely dynamic continuity. This refers to the simultaneous persistence and plasticity (sometimes subversiveness) of topoi, narrative-argumentative structures and rhetorics based on group stereotypes. Antisemitic discourse can be produced in two models of public debate, which I call the grand synthesis and the small analysis. While the former consists in combining fragments of discourse from different orders, and the latter in separating conflicting interpretations regardless of their deep causes — both are associated with the rejection of a critical perspective.
The current context is the war in the Gaza Strip. This event fuels the production of antisemitic discourse that is an amalgam of criticism of Israel and phantasms that undermine knowledge about the Holocaust and its aftermath. This phenomenon affects social understanding of antisemitism and public ways of discussing the Polish-Jewish past.
Host:
Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak – sociologist, researcher of public discourse, literary critic. She works at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Łódź. She studies collective memory, symbolic power and the discourse of symbolic elites. Author of the monograph “Unwanted Debate. The Controversy over the Books of Jan Tomasz Gross” (2017).
