Modern and Radical: Politics, Culture, and Socialization of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland

by Kamil Kijek

Overview

Why were the last generation of Jews to grow up in Poland before the Holocaust so susceptible to change and new ideas? Despite any major differences between different groups of Jewish youth, whether rich, poor, traditional, orthodox, Zionist, socialist, or communist, the generation as a whole was unified by "radical modernism," engaging with revolutionary political ideologies of the 1930s.

Modern and Radical explores the political consciousness of this generation of Jewish youth who came of age in 1930s Poland. Author Kamil Kijek describes how Jewish youth in the 1920s and '30s, unlike their parents and grandparents, attended Polish public schools, adapted to the realities of a Polish national state, and were significantly influenced by both Polish elite and popular cultures—despite the state's emphasis on ethnic Polish nationalism creating a strong feeling of exclusion. This, combined with discrimination in higher education and employment, as well as the growth of antisemitism, created a generation of Jewish youth with a complex, love-hate relationship with the Polish state.

Drawing on hundreds of autobiographies penned by young Polish Jews throughout the 1930s, Modern and Radical provides rich insight into how this unique group of Jewish youth in the interwar period experienced life in the emerging national Polish state., reviewing a previous edition or volume

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253074935
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	02/03/2026
Series:	Jews of Eastern Europe
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)
Language:	Polish
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kamil Kijek is Assistant Professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He has held doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships in the United States, Israel, Germany, and the United Kingdom, including in the Center for Jewish History in New York and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Tradition: Young People in the World of Their Parents, Religion, the Shtetl and the Jewish Neighborhood
2. Young People's Personal Ambitions and World of Work
3. Public Schools
4. Jewish Private Education
5. Patterns of Participation in Culture: Nationalism, Polonization and Polish-Jewish Culture
6. Symbolic Exclusion and Antisemitism
7. Political Activity
8. Political Consciousness
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Reading not only for sociological data but to excavate the assumptions and understandings common to a generation's social imagination, Kijek has produced, at one level, an endlessly rich, wideranging, and insightful ethnographic reconstruction of the lives and hopes of the Jewish generation that came of age in the 1930s. If that were all he had accomplished, that in itself would be enough to merit the wide attention the book will surely receive. But add to that the fact that it makes not one but by my count five major arguments about the trajectory of Polish Jewish political, religious, social, and cultural history in the 1930s, and this a work that nobody working on modern Jewish history can ignore."—Kenneth B. Moss, author of An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

"By examining a treasure trove of documents—a huge collection of first-hand accounts written by Jewish youth in the 1930s as part of an essay competition— Kamil Kijek is able to show a fascinating contradiction. On the one hand, these texts reinforce the aforementioned pessimism and even despair. On the other hand, the people writing those documents were deeply embedded in a Polish-language culture, often to the point of being able to write only in Polish. . . . Kijek explores a community that was inexorably trending towards linguistic acculturation because of all the familiar forces of modernization (urbanization, a universal educational curriculum, mass popular culture), even as the politics of nationalism created a deepening chasm between each ethnic group."—Brian Porter-Szucs, author of Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom

From the Publisher