Who, What, When, Where, and Why Is Polish Jewry? Envisioning, Constructing, and Possessing Polish Jewry

Abstract

"Go back to North Tel Aviv and eat gefilte fish with all the other Polanim! Go already, your Auntie Bella is waiting for you!" With this burst of anger, resentment, frustration, irony, and ridicule, I was once thrown out of a taxi in Jerusalem. For years, the driver's hostile references to Polish Jews--and not the actual act of being kicked out of the cab--puzzled me. How could the authentic representatives of a pure and noble past that I instinctively associated with the words of Y. L. Peretz and a handful of yellowed family photographs be the target of such invective? Little, in fact, seemed further from the fond memories of my grandparents, their fellow immigrant cronies, and the worlds that their stories created than this native-born Israeli's image of Polish Jews. In his eyes, Polish Jews (Polanim in Hebrew) were a snobbish, elitist, and often racist group that had commandeered key positions throughout all sectors of Israeli society and had collectively conspired to exploit and oppress Jews of Middle Eastern origin. Polish Jews had become a metonym not only for larger, more abstract social and political inequalities but also for the very tangible state of inequality in which this driver found himself serving me. 1 [End Page 205]