Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 28, 2023

Polish Jewry’s Not-So-Golden Age

On the edge of the abyss.

Between the world wars, the Jews of newly independent Poland had renowned yeshivas, a vibrant civil society, numerous newspapers in multiple languages, networks of secular and religious schools of every stripe, a robust and diverse array of political movements and parties, and one of the greatest collections of writers, scholars (rabbinic and academic), artists, and intellectuals the Jewish world had ever seen. It is easy, then, to see this era as a golden age. Yet, Kenneth Moss argues in his book An Unchosen People, most Polish Jewish thinkers of the 1920s and 30s saw their circumstances very differently. David Engel writes in his review:

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