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Life is a gift from God. It is sacred for God is the absolute holiness. Being received as a gift from God, it is our duty to bring her to its holiness and then give it back to God to render it eternal, not to let it be spoilt by our nature that was corrupted by the original sin. Meant to support human life, the Human Rights Declaration considers life to be the right of rights, which is the greatest right which ultimately surpasses the others. In other words, all the other rights are meant to give quality to life. Based on these realities, according both to divine right and human right, we all have the holy duty to respect our personal life and its proper dignity (values) and in the same time we have the duty to respect in all respects the life of our brother. All attempts to take someone’s life are forbidden.
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Our Class was received in Poland with enthusiasm. The author was praised for his courage and his voice was considered a balanced part of the Jedwabne pogrom discussion, taking place in Poland since 2000. Why this enthusiasm now, when the publication of the Neighbours was received without it? What changes to narration about Jedwabne provided by Słobodzianek were so successful? The article described the drama’s reception which turns out to be selective. It also refers to the play’s text, bringing out two orders of presenting and explaining the events. Firstly, Our Class creates a picture of interpersonal relations where social mechanisms of discrimination are erased. This thread is picked up and developed by the Polish reviewers. The Slaughter on Jews becomes an outcome of a conflict between two equal groups with similar possibilities of action and agency and therefore not linked to domination of the majority over the minority. Hence, the symmetry of harm and as a consequence, the question of guilt and the alleged tragedy of the characters becomes unsolvable. That is supported by psychological explanations of motives and behaviours, modelled on family relations. The viewpoint of the event’s participants, that is a discrimination symptom itself, is being treated as an objectifying description. Seen up close and psychologized fates of the characters veil the background of the dominating group’s violence. This violence can be explained only in sociological terms. However Słobodzianek refers also to descriptions on a social level. In that manner he constructs the scene of Rachelka’s wedding and the handling of her salvation after the war relating it to extraordinarily described phenomena of the Righteous Among the Nations’ social functioning. He notices and describes subordination rituals organised for the Survivors and the Survivor’s mimicry. Those threads were completely ignored by the reviewers, however. They were also unable to break through the narration structures of the first type, which are more recognisable.
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The paper provides a reconstruction and proposes the deconstruction of the conception of the Polish experience of the Holocaust as collective trauma. The analytical framework is based on the revision of concepts such as Polish witness (bystander/onlooker – according to Hilberg) and indifference on the part of Polish majority society towards the persecution and murder of the Jews. The text postulates that the concept of indifference as well as that of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) be dropped from the standard terminology used when describing the Holocaust. It proposes that the concept of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) be replaced by the concept of participating observer – with a different understanding from that established within cultural anthropology. Thus, watching would be a form of activity, a way of having an influence on the events, of agency, and therefore participation. A significant part of my argument includes an attempt to address the question of the construction of watching during the Holocaust. From this it follows that watching constitutes the most basic form of power (droit de regard – according to Foucault and Bourdieu). Therefore, the question arises of whether or not one can describe the margins of the Holocaust within the terms of panoptic reality (le panoptisme – according to Foucault). A further question under consideration is whether one can depict the dominant majority as an unofficial authority wielding something akin to social control over the completion of the Holocaust understood as the German Nazi system of persecution and extermination of the Jews. The argument also foregrounds the actual functions of the concepts of the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker) and indifference as well as the idea of the Holocaust as a trauma for the non-Jewish witness (bystander/onlooker). These functions resulted several times in the elimination of the historical concrete and its societal-cultural conditions from the field of vision. In this sense, the conception of unacquired memory (i.e. the Polish trauma of the Holocaust) would be a strategy for acquiring the memory of the Holocaust in such a way that it does not endanger the dominant narrative about the past and the identity of the majority. Furthermore, the paper proposes the deconstruction of the concept of Polish-Jewish dialogue by identifying the phenomena of false symmetry and false universalization that frequently result in defining anti-Semitism and the Holocaust within the categories of a groups conflicts. The inspiration to undertake such a critical analysis came from the paradigmatic work by Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, published in 1997. (The Polish-language edition entitled Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady [Memory unacquired. The Polish memory of the Holocaust] came out in 2000, translated by Agata Tomaszewska.)
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Review: Literatura polska wobec Zagłady (1939-1968) [Polish Literature and the Holocaust (1939-1968)], ed. by S. Buryła, D. Krawczyńska and J. Leociak, Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012.
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The anti-Semitism of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin became, at the beginning of the Cold War, an anti-Semitic paranoia and took on the most radical form during the campaign against Western influence on Soviet society. Soon after the destruction of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the Doctors’ Plot campaign was launched at the end of 1952; it soon became a perfect basis for blaming all Jews as disloyal to the Soviet regime. In the republics of the USSR the local Communist leaders supported the anti-Semitic campaign in Moscow with allegations about Jewish medical crimes at the local level.Despite much circumstantial evidence and many testimonies there still is no strong basis for the conclusion that the anti-Semitic campaign of 1952-1953 would soon turn into a large-scale repression campaign or wholesale genocide of the Jewish population in the USSR, but the clear anti-Jewish policy and the Soviet practice of the mass repression of nations leaves little doubt that the Soviet society was mentally prepared for the deportation of Jews to Siberia. The Soviet regime practiced constant archive purge campaigns, and documents about politically sensitive issues or regime crime were destroyed on a regular basis. Despite all regime efforts, some traces of anti-Semitic campaign preparation, control, and coordination may be found not in the central state institutions of the USSR but in the Communist Party archives of the republics. At the republican level Communist party Central Committees some top secret documents of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1953 were preserved in specific archive units, the so-called Osobaja Papka.In the USSR the reports of local party leaders to Moscow always described never-existing enthusiastic popular support for Soviet policies; thus the true scale of anti-Semitism in society can’t be determined on the basis of such sources. But they demonstrate that local Soviet institutions supported the spread of anti-Semitism during the infamous Doctors’ Plot campaign of 1953. They also permit the conclusion that any anti-Semitic campaign would not be limited to negative propaganda and at least part of Soviet society was ready to accept some repression of Jews.Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 put an early end to the anti-Semitic campaign. Soon Stalin’s political heirs quashed charges against the doctors and even punished a few distinguished instigators of the campaign, but there was no official and public condemnation of that anti-Semitic campaign. Thereupon anti-Semitism became less aggressive but still remained very strong in the USSR.
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This is a Polish translation of a chapter from Berel Lang’s latest book, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life, published by Yale University Press in 2013. Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jewish chemist and writer, is best known for his autobiographical accounts of his experiences at Auschwitz. His best known works, Se questo è un uomo [1947; If This Is a Man] and I sommersi e i salvati [1986; The Drowned and the Saved], present philosophical reflections on people’s behaviour and reactions in liminal situations. This chapter from Lang’s book deals with Levi’s sense of identity and the impact that his camp experience had on his understanding of Jewishness.
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« Nous ne voulons pas que notre histoire soit oubliée ! » » Ceci résume bien les motivations d’un bon nombre d’écrivains juifs francophones originaires des pays arabes. Or pendant longtemps, l’oubli menaçait d’une seconde disparition la civilisation séfarade. Aujourd’hui pourtant, cette mémoire resurgit comme jamais. “We don’t want our story to be forgotten !” This statement sums up the motivations of many French-speaking Jewish writers from Arab nations. For a long time, loss of memory threatened to make Sephardic civilisation disappear for a second time. Today,however, these memories are flourishing like never before. Keywords : Forgetting, silence, Sephardic memory, literature, Sephardic history Giovanni Rotiroti, « Perspectives psychanalytiques du regard : Gherasim
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The article discusses the reception of Tuwim’s manifesto in Israel, focusing in particular on the 1940s. The author analyses various critical reponses to the poem expressed by Jewish critics in Palestine. Tuwim’s reception in Israel is presented from a new perspective which has not been explore so far.
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The term “post-Jewish property” has a descriptive function in Polish. It is present in both colloquial speech and academic discourse. This specific collocation usually does not raise semantic suspicions and is considered a carrier of neutral content used to describe certain material assets, that is the property of Jews who were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust, in particular – the real estate remaining in Poland, whose owners changed. The problem with the term “post-Jewish property” understood in this way is that it is based on false foundations and incorporates functions assigned to it in order to ensure the comfort of the Polish national community. The key objective of this paper is to deconstruct this highly convenient and useful conceptual collocation, indicate its origin and, primarily, to answer the question of what it tries to erase/conceal.
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This article discusses attempts by members of the Frankfurt School to establish collaborations with the American film industry. Kracauer’s screenplay for the film Jacques Offenbach as well as Horkheimer and Adorno’s screenplay for Below the Surface have both been preserved. They shed light on the processes of institutional negotiation, which lead to theory’s critical position with respect to the cultural industry. Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea for a film was rooted in their research on anti-Semitism. Their colleagues in Hollywood reworked this idea, and although their film was never produced, its premises inspired other productions about racial prejudice, such as Gentelmen’s Agreement (1947). This case study reveals that contingency is a crucial factor for theoretical production, which suggests the possibility of a symmetrical relationship between theory and its ‘passive’ subject.
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Kad su u ožujku 2014. objavljena Heideggerova »Promišljanja II-XV«, niz Crnih bilježnica, ko je je sam tako zvao, postalo je očito da se ti tekstovi razlikuju od svih dosad poznatih Heideggerovih spisa. Oni kao da jasnije i neposrednije govore o filozofskim motivacijama i intencijama, kao da jasnije pokazuju protiv čega se okreće Heideggerovo mišljenje tridesetih godina, i dokazuju da se Heideggerovo mišljenje krajem tridesetih godina, u okruženju Drugog svjetskoga rata, otvara prema antisemitskim idejama.
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Do otprilike tridesetak godina prije kraja devetnaestog stoljeća, sve istočno od zamišljene linije povučene negdje između Grčke i Turske zvalo se Orijent. Kao etiketa stvorena u Europi, ≫Orijent≪ je stoljećima predstavljao poseban mentalitet, na primjer u frazi ≫orijentalno mišljenje ≪, a isto tako i skup posebnih kulturalnih, političkih pa čak i rasnih obilježja (u koncepcijama kao što su orijentalni despot, orijentalna putenost, raskoš, neshvatljivost).
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Osnivanje države Izrael nekad se percipiralo kao suprotnost holokaustu, njegova najsavršenija antiteza: Holokaust je bio destrukcija i pulzija smrti, Izrael je konstrukcija i pulzija života; u logorima smrti crkavalo se ≫poput ovaca za klanje≪, u Izraelu se također umire neprirodnom smrću i redom koji je suprotan slijedu generacija, ali barem su vojnici poginuli u ratu i civili pokošeni u atentatima – do danas njih oko 30.000 – pokopani na grobljima na kojima im se može odati tiha počast, dok je gotovo 6 milijuna njihovih predaka lišeno pokopa ili je imalo pravo tek na zajedničku raku.
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Suvremenim zapadnim društvima predstoji zadaća ponovnog raskrivanja vrijednosti susjedstva među različitim vjernicima i različitim religijama u doba koje nazivaju globalizacijom. Ljudi je na zemaljskoj kugli sve više, pa i susjedstva treba biti više. A što je, u najkraćem, susjedstvo?
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The article introduces the analysis of primary sources referring to ethnic composition of students from the University of Stefan Batory. It shows the great diversity, since the students were represented by all ethnic groups living in Eastern Borderlands at that time, and also students from abroad. Characteristic feature of the University of Stefan Batory was co-existence of students of various ethnical background: The Jews, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Russians. The greatest group was represented by polish students, and Catholicism was the most popular denomination. In the second part of the article national relations on the University of Stefan Batory were discussed, particularly focusing on the Jewish issue. Different students houses representing national minorities were compared. Moreover, various organizations and associations of national minorities in the University of Stefan Batory were mentioned .
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P. Yu. Todorov is one of the few Bulgarian writers who artistically recreate the Jewish theme. His story "Stones" is directly connected with the life of the Bulgarian Jews, but in the first volume of his collected works (1979), it is called "idyll". Another mistake, but this time a typo, is that in the contents of this volume the title "Stones" is printed as "Reed". This article attempts to prove that "Stones" does not fit the genre "idyll" and that this story is tied with both moments of the biography of the writer, as well as his civil and socio-moral positions. The analysis is based on documentary sources, letters, memoirs, and himself publications of P. Yu. Todorov. The historical and biblical events and motives that are directly or indirectly present in the work are also interpreted. One of the important conclusions is that "Stones" represents a more complex genre mixture, in which modern and traditional narrative and stylistic techniques are intertwined, building its semantic polyphony.
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This paper presents several documents kept in the archive of the city of Sombor in the fund of the Magistrate of the Free Royal City 1749-1918, which refer to an interesting case of an attempt to challenge the treatment given to two patients by the city surgeon, Antonius Merkel. The lawsuit was filed by another doctor, Carl Reitzinger, accusing his colleague of excessive treatment costs and the use of certain medication. Although the attached documents do not shed light on the conclusion of the dispute, one gets the impression that Antonius Merkel successfully justifies his actions. The transcribed and translated documents provide significant insight into the nature of medical treatment in Sombor in the second half of the 18th century.
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The ghetto in Radomsko was established in December 1939. During its almost three year existence more than 20,000 Jews lived there. In October 1942, as part of Operation “Reinhardt,” the deportation of the ghetto inhabitants began, which led to their extermination. This article aims to reconstruct the situation in the ghetto in Radomsko on the eve of the beginning of the deportations in 1942. The author tries to answer the question regarding the inhabitants’ level of awareness of the approaching threat. Based on the survivors’ testimonies, an attempt is made to determine to what extent the Jews of Radomsko knew about the process and actual purpose of the deportation, as their reaction to the news and actions they took were based on their growing understanding of Operation “Reinhardt”.
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