Here’s a short piece by Raedwald on little wooden doll stereotypes of Polish Jews:

But this trip, for the first time, I briefly explored the old ghetto, and visited one of the old synagogues, where I listened briefly to a young American woman talking history to a small group. She offered the fact of these dolls, available everywhere, and often depicted holding money, as evidence that Poles were "still anti-Jewish". Restraining the impulse to respond "Tsshk – always the victim already …" I quickly moved away. 

And here’s a gallop through the ups and downs of the Jewish presence in Poland down the centuries. It helpfully reminds us that explicit anti-semitism was part of the Polish Communist Party’s policy after WW2.

Meanwhile now in Warsaw a splendid new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being built, a huge project which is expected to become a major visitor attraction in that part of Europe. Part of the thinking here is that Auschwitz and the other creepy Nazi concentration camp sites in Poland and elsewhere remind us only how Europe’s Jews died – the point of the new museum is to celebrate how they lived.

Back in 2009 I wrote here about Nasty Polish Right-wing Antisemitism:

All this history and far more remains highly controversial, not least because it suits a lot of people with things to hide to keep things that way.

What if any conclusions one way or the other might be drawn about the massacre by local Poles of some 400 Jews at Jedwabne in 1941? Or the fact that so many Poles were executed by the Nazis for protecting Poles? Or the later Kielce pogrom in 1946 – a horror inspired by the communist secret police?

Was/is modern antisemitism in Poland some sort of aberration reflecting wider European intellectual trends?

Or was it something much deeper in the Polish national psyche, waiting for its horrible chance to erupt?

Is Poland better or worse in these respects than eg France or Germany?

What about the role of individuals such as Helena Wolinska-Brus? She was an unrepentant post-WW2 Stalinist prosecutor from a Polish Jewish family who left Poland in the antisemitic Party campaigns of 1968 and ended up in the UK. Until her death last year she successfully fought extradition back to democratic Poland to face justice on her Stalin-era judicial crimes, mendaciously citing Polish antisemitism as one reason she would not get a fair trial.

One of the other points I made there was the following:

… what about basic nomenclature?

Just as the denizens of Republika Srpska call themselves ‘Bosnian Serbs’ rather than Serbian Bosnians, thereby emphasising their ultimate Serbitude rather than their Bosnian-ness, should we be talking about Polish Jews or Jewish Poles?

The very words we use silently and slyly can denote sameness or ‘other-ness’. Would a Museum of the History of Jewish Poles have different exhibitions? Or be able to raise international funding?