Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 23, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies for a book talk by Kamil Kijek.
Why were the last generation of Jews to grow up in Poland before the Holocaust so susceptible to change and new ideas? Despite any major differences between different groups of Jewish youth, whether rich, poor traditional, orthodox, Zionist, socialist, or communist, the generation as a whole was unified by “radical modernism,” engaging with revolutionary political ideologies of the 1930s.
“Modern and Radical” explores the political consciousness of this generation of Jewish youth who came of age in 1930s Poland. Author Kamil Kijek describes how Jewish youth in the 1920s and ’30s, unlike their parents and grandparents, attended Polish public schools, adapted to the realities of a Polish national state, and were significantly influenced by both Polish elite and popular cultures—despite the state’s emphasis on ethnic Polish nationalism creating a strong feeling of exclusion. This, combined with discrimination in higher education and employment, as well as the growth of antisemitism, created a generation of Jewish youth with a complex, love-hate relationship with the Polish state.
Drawing on hundreds of autobiographies penned by young Polish Jews throughout the 1930s, “Modern and Radical” provides rich insight into how this unique group of Jewish youth in the interwar period experienced life in the emerging national Polish state.
Kamil Kijek is the Vice-Director of and Assistant Professor at Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland. He has been a Prins Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, as well as Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich. During his doctoral studies he held various fellowships in Israel, Germany and the United Kingdom. His research interests include Central-East European Jewish History at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as social and cultural theory. His current book project is entitled “Polish Shtetl after the Holocaust? Cold War, Jewish World and Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, 1945-1950.”
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