A revisionist account of interwar Europe’s largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the necessity of choice.
What did the future hold for interwar Europe’s largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with “no tomorrow.” Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalism’s collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities really possessed, and where a future might be found―and for whom.
The story of modern Jewry is often told as one of creativity and contestation. Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a late 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.
Focusing not on ideals but on a search for realism, Moss recasts the history of modern Jewish political thought. Where much scholarship seeks Jewish agency over a collective future, An Unchosen People recovers a darker tradition characterized by painful tradeoffs amid a harrowing political reality, making Polish Jewry a paradigmatic example of the minority experience endemic to the nation-state.
Nonfiction
An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland
January 3, 2022
Discussion Questions
This is a work of passionately engaged scholarship that delves into the political thinking of Polish Jews before World War II. Using diaries, novels, autobiographies, letters, essays, sociological studies, and other sources, Moss uncovers the profound hopelessness of Polish Jews, including non-Zionist ones, regarding their future in the face of rising antisemitism. Moss discovers an intense yearning to emigrate in a world where there was usually no place to go, along with an intense interest in Palestine, not out of Zionism but out of sober analysis of their present and despair over their future in Poland. This is a haunting book that raises questions about the limits of Jewish ideologies in the face of fierce hostility in the state and society, and the inability of Jewish political movements to engage in effective collective action. Written in a compelling and riveting style, this is a book that will provoke discussion and soul-searching among readers of all types.
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