Nearly 60 Years Ago, a Polish Journalist Wrote a Familiar-Sounding Attack on Anti-Zionism

In 1967, following Israel’s sudden victory over the Soviet-backed Syrian and Egyptian armies, the Kremlin started encouraging anti-Zionist rhetoric often barely distinguishable from anti-Semitism. For Poland, the events came at a time of upheaval: there was a student movement increasingly unhappy with one-party rule and a head of state eager to maintain his position amid the reshuffling following Leonid Brezhnev’s consolidation of power in Moscow. When the Polish party began encouraging anti-Jewish propaganda, it unleashed a tidal wave of repressed anti-Semitism that culminated in the expulsion of the vast majority of the country’s Jews in 1968.