An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland

September 6, 2026

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5 min read

In October 1933, the Marxist writer Y. L. Oster warned Polish Jews that none of the political ideologies they were banking on—liberalism, socialism, Zionism—would have much effect on their fate. He predicted that by the time the storms grew still, “the Jewish people will be crushed and broken.” Oster’s dark vision was not exceptional. But in An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, Kenneth B. Moss argues that thinkers like Oster deserve more than the label “pessimists.” They were, instead, engaged in a painful and urgent attempt to understand a world that seemed to be moving in directions indifferent to Jewish will. Moss’s book is an exploration of how some Polish Jews, between roughly 1932 and 1936, began to reckon with two simultaneous recognitions: that they faced grave danger, and that they had remarkably little capacity to shape the course of events.

A Quiet Revolution in Political Thinking

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introduction and Guest Setup** - Host Janet Tashinsky introduces the YIVO Institute, author Kenneth B. Moss, and discussant Steven Zipperstein.
2 (02:21) **Core Thesis: The "Unchosen People" Framework** - Moss opens by reading a 1933 text by journalist Yitzhak Oster, who predicted catastrophe for Poland's three million Jews and argued that no existing Jewish political ideology could save them.
3 (05:56) **The Grassroots "Culture of Inquiry"** - Moss introduces Miriam Chalev, a 1933 emissary from Palestine who found young Polish Zionists indifferent to ideology but intensely curious about how the world actually worked.
4 (08:24) **Three Parts of the Book** - Moss outlines the book's structure: intellectual history of renegade thinkers, revisionist history of Yiddishism/diasporism, and grassroots political change among youth.
5 (12:07) **Emergency, Renunciation, and Triage** - The final chapter explores painful new forms of Jewish political rationality under the pressure of imminent danger and limited agency.
6 (13:32) **Zipperstein's First Question: The Book's Unusual Structure** - Zipperstein asks how Moss arrived at a book structured conceptually rather than chronologically, and why it centers on "futurelessness."
7 (17:35) **The Quiet Setting** - Moss emphasizes the book is set during a relatively quiet political period (the era of Piłsudski's rule), not a time of open catastrophe.

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Show Notes

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish 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.

Join Kenneth Moss in conversation with Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein for a discussion on this new publication and the history it unveils.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on March 2, 2022.

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