“Cities of Boundless Possibilities:” Polish Jewry Between the Wars
On the eve of the Holocaust, Polish Jewry – Europe’s largest Jewish community and most of American and Israeli Jewry’s historic “heartland” – was a vital and dynamic society: a forward looking “brave new world” filled with potential, brimming with life, and caught up in and grappling with a process of transformation that was informed not only by old tensions and conflicts, but also by new attitudes and institutions and , above all, by new relationships with the wider world.
Dr. Sternberg is affiliated with the University of Kansas Jewish Studies Program, where she teaches a range of Jewish history courses – among them, modern Jewish History, medieval and early modern Jewry, the Holocaust, Hitler and Nazi Germany and the history of Jewish women. Her research and areas of interest include 19th and 20th century East European Jewry, interwar Polish Jewry, the shtetl, antisemitism, and the Holocaust.
Presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and Union Station Kansas City in support of the exhibition Auschwitz: Not long ago. Not far away.