An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

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The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice. Moss examines the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, and the limits of resistance. He reconstructs the desperate creativity of activists seeking to counter despair where they could not redress its causes. And he recovers a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews, young and powerless, as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves – in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

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About the Speakers

Kenneth B. Moss is Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, which won the Sami Rohr Prize of the National Jewish Book Council. His work has appeared in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese as well as English.

Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author and editor of nine books; his most recent is Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/WW Norton) named a book of the year by The Economist and shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award and the Mark Lytton Prize as the best non-fiction book of 2018. He is now writing a biography of Philip Roth for Yale's Jewish Lives series.