Reconfiguring Diaspora: Jews and Polish Solidarność in the 1980s

The fact that Jews and those of Jewish descent played an outsized role in the democratic opposition in Poland in the 1980s, including the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement, has been little acknowledged or studied. This talk explores not only how Polish Jews shaped Solidarity, but how Solidarity shaped Polish Jews. Solidarity served as a space for the reinvention of Jewish identities and a crucial vector of relations with the global Jewish diaspora. Yet these relations were marked by tension and competing visions of diaspora, culminating in the controversies surrounding the 40th anniversary commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1983. The talk concludes by asking what the story of Solidarity and its Jewish supporters might tell us about broader reconfigurations of global Jewish politics in the 1980s.