The Jews in Poland and Russia
Volume 1: 1350-1881
Antony Polonsky

Author Information - Contents - Publication Details

The history of the Jewish communities of these lands-where most of the Jews of Europe and America originated-is often the subject of woolly thinking and stereotypes. Antony Polonsky recreates this lost world in a way that avoids both sentimentalism and the simplification of the east European Jewish experience into a story of persecution and martyrdom. This is an important story whose relevance extends beyond the Jewish world or the bounds of east-central Europe.

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Antony Polonsky was born in Johannesburg, and studied history and political science at the University of the Witwatersrand. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1961 and read modern history at Worcester College and St Antony's College. He taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1970 to 1992. Since then he has been at Brandeis University, where in 1999 he was appointed Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, an appointment held jointly at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Warsaw, the Institute for the Human Sciences, Vienna, and the University of Cape Town; Skirball visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; and Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, Oxford.

He is the author of Politics in Independent Poland (1972), The Little Dictators: A History of Eastern Europe since 1918 (1975), and The Great Powers and the Polish Question, 1941-1945 (1976). He is the editor of Abraham Lewin's A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (1988), which was awarded the Joseph and Edith Sunlight Literary Prize in 1989 and the prize of the (US) National Jewish Book Council in the Holocaust section in 1990. He is co-author of The History of Poland since 1863 (1981) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981), and co-editor of Ideas into Politics Aspects of European History, 1880-1950 (1984), The Jews in Poland (1986), Polish Paradoxes (1990), The Jews in Warsaw (1991), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-1946 (1991) and The Jews in Old Poland (1993). He is the editor of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, also published (since 1993) by the Littman Library.

Professor Polonsky is vice-president of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies and of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies. He is an editor of The Library of Holocaust Testimonies, and a member of the International Council of the State Museum in Auschwitz, and of the International Advisory Board of the Mordecai Anieliewicz Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Warsaw. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the National Polish American-Jewish American Task Force and an Associate of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. In 1999 he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.

PUBLICATION DETAILS