Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction with Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

October 14, 2026

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5 min read

In 2005, Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal visited Poland with her family and met her Polish friend’s father. She asked him directly about antisemitism in Poland. He answered with conviction that there was none—only economic conflict. Stark-Blumenthal, trained in Holocaust studies at Brandeis, shot back: “What about the Polish death camps?” He corrected her quietly: “Those were Nazi death camps.” She knew that. But her brain had conflated Nazis and Poles in an instant. That moment, she says, she hopes she will never forget. It launched a twenty-year research project that became Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2024), a book that places five centuries of Polish-Jewish interaction into a single frame and asks both groups to see the other’s suffering alongside their own.

The Jewish Middleman and the Khmelnitsky Massacres

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Ads and Episode Introduction** - Podcast begins with a series of ads, followed by host Amber Nickel introducing the episode and guest Jennifer Stark-Blumenthal.
2 (04:00) **Personal Origin Story: A Jewish Summer Camp and a Challenging Trip to Poland** - Stark-Blumenthal explains how her personal encounters with Polish Catholics at a Jewish summer camp and a subsequent trip to Poland shattered her preconceptions and launched her 20-year research project.
3 (09:57) **The Trope of the Jewish Middleman: Origins and Consequences** - Stark-Blumenthal explains how the 16th-century Catholic Church’s prohibition on usury and trade forced the Polish crown and nobility to task Jews with these roles, creating the “middleman” stereotype.
4 (13:20) **The Khmelnytsky Massacres: A Case Study in Conflicting National Narratives** - Stark-Blumenthal uses the 1648 Khmelnytsky massacres to illustrate how both Poles and Jews teach the event through the lens of their own group’s suffering, ignoring the other’s pain.
5 (18:15) **Myth vs. History: The Case of Judeo-Communism** - Stark-Blumenthal defines a myth as a stagnant story with “kernels of truth” that a group uses to define itself, contrasting it with dynamic, evidence-based history.
6 (28:47) **Placing the Holocaust on a Longer Continuum: Two Genocides, Side-by-Side** - Stark-Blumenthal explains why she placed chapters on Polish genocide and Jewish genocide (the Holocaust) next to each other, arguing that both groups were victimized and both feel they are the most victimized.
7 (34:19) **The American Lens: How U.S. Culture Shaped Jewish Views of Poles** - Stark-Blumenthal explains how American film, literature, and jokes have portrayed Poles as uneducated, poor brutes, which influenced American Jews’ understanding of Poland.

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Show Notes

Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2024) confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.

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