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What can a temporal comparison of two pogroms in the same city in the wake of two vastly different military conflicts reveal about context and function of anti‐Jewish violence? What can it tell us about historical continuity and change? These questions frame the history below which focuses on two pogroms in the city of Kraków on April 16, 1918, and August 11, 1945. This article argues that in both cases perpetrators perceived the state as failing to meet their basic economic, national, and moral expectations after the wars which left political and social chaos, economic ruin, and dismal law and order. To address the state's failings and restore the "moral balance," the perpetrators targeted the Jews whom they perceived as the state's beneficiaries. After the Second World War, the violence only intensified when the medieval myth of ritual murder reemerged, and Jewish women and children became the targets of aggression. This change can only be explained by the specific context of WWII when redemptive antisemitism of Nazi propaganda and the daily practice of genocide stripped Jews of the remains of their humanity thus marking them as the ultimate threat to Polish survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the migratory experiences of four ethnic Polish and Jewish families from Poland in the aftermath of World War II. It focuses on their agency--choices and decisions--at the time of their displacement, showing that they all improvised or acted creatively, at times outside legal bounds, to find new homes. This article places their agency within gendered family dynamics and the broader social, cultural, and economic contexts. While the postwar displacement by and large maintained gender inequalities, it also created conditions in which the most constrained family members (women and children) could exercise meaningful action by using the available models and resources and inverting the traditional family roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most sources, though, are on Grodno, forcing the author to reach for Minsk material to fill in the Soviet/Vitebsk story. Jeffrey Koerber's I Borderland Generation i is an insightful account of the generation of young Jews whose formative years fell in the 1920s and 1930s in two cities of the Polish-Soviet borderland: Polish Grodno and Soviet-Belorussian Vitebsk. The author contrasts educational systems, employment opportunities, and levels of antisemitic violence in Grodno and Vitebsk to show how these circumstances affected Jewish familial, communal, and religious lives, as well as identity formation. [Extracted from the article]

A literary criticism of the book “Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust" by Evgeny Finkel is presented. Topics discussed include the book focusing on the behavior of the Holocaust victims instead of the perpetrators, and the testimonies of approximately 500 Holocaust survivor across Minsk, Białystok, and Kraków to discuss the victim strategies of cooperation, coping and resistance.

This article examines how Jewish leaders in post-war Slovakia negotiated the restitution of property with the legislative and executive powers in Bratislava and Prague. The Jewish leaders were affiliated with two Slovak Jewish organisations founded in 1945: the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia (Ústredny sväz zidovskych nábozenskych obci na Slovensku, ÚSZNO) and the Organisation of Victims of Racial Persecution at the Hands of the Fascist Regime in Bratislava (Sdruzenie fasistickym rezimom rasovo prenaslcdovanych v Bratislave, SRP). The Secretary General of the SRP, Dr Vojtech Winterstein, was the main voice negotiating and promoting the interests of the post-war Jewish community. His invaluable collection of documents - the Winterstein collection - provides the source base for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak state redrew the boundaries around its national/ethnic community, defining anew who belonged and who did not. This process primarily involved the redefinition of the criteria for citizenship. Jewish survivors were among those who negotiated for the recognition of their citizenship. Since the Czechoslovak government did not grant Jews legal status as a national minority, Jewish survivors could be freely classified as Slovaks, Czechs, Germans, or Magyars. The latter two translated into refusal of citizenship and expulsion. This article discusses how Magyar-speaking Jews in Slovakia struggled to secure Czechoslovak citizenship through dialogue and conflict between their representatives, local administrations, and the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a symposium "Revival of Jewish Studies in Eastern Europe," at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona, on November 8-9, 2012. Topics include Jewish nationalism, changing political, economic, and cultural environments in each country and ethnic identities of scholars pursuing Jewish studies and questions about antisemitism.