Preface

Summary

THIS volume of Polin is the first to appear under the imprint of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Major changes have been made in the editorial structure: it will now be run by a committee chaired by Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University, and whose members are Israel Bartal, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Gershon Hundert, McGill University, Montreal; Magdalena Opalski, Carleton University, Ottawa; and Jerzy Tomaszewski, University of Warsaw. This editorial committee has also been significantly enlarged to reflect both our relocation and our interest in the whole of the area covered by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania.

This issue, which is edited by Antony Polonsky and two guest editors, Ezra Mendelsohn, Professor in the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Professor of History at the University of Warsaw and Director of the Mordecai Anielewicz Center for the Study of the History and Culture of Polish Jews at Warsaw University, is devoted to the history of the Jewish community in interwar Poland. A number of the articles which appear in it were first delivered as papers at the international conference on the history of the Jews in Poland held in Jerusalem in 1988, and we are happy that some of the proceedings of that memorable occasion will be given a permanent character.

For Volume 9, we have chosen as our theme ‘Poles, Jews, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal'. The aim will be to investigate why the socialist ideal, whether in its social democratic or in its revolutionary variant, was unable to transcend national divisions on the Polish lands. Volume 10 will contain a core of articles on the history of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth down to the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century. Volume 11 will be devoted to investigating the perspectives which sociology can provide on Polish-Jewish relations and the history of the Jews in Poland.

In addition, each volume will contain a section in which new views about key issues in the history of the Jews in Poland can be discussed (considerations of space have meant that this section has had to be omitted from this volume), together with review essays, a full review section, and a record of new publications in the field of Polish Jewish history.