Join IIJS and the Harriman Institute for a book talk with Prof. Kamil Kijek on his recent work, Modern and Radical. The event will take place on Tuesday, February 24, at 6:00 p.m., in the Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room, 1219 International Affairs Building.
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.
Kamil Kijek is Vice-Director and Assistant Professor of the Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. He has been a Prins Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, as well as Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich. During his doctoral studies he held various fellowships in Israel, Germany, and United Kingdom. His research interests include Central-East European Jewish History in the end of XIX and in XX century, social and cultural theory.
In 2018 he received an international prize for an outstanding publication in the topic of “Jews and Illiberal Regimes in Eastern Europe after 1917” granted by The Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East-European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the book Dzieci modernizmu. He co-curated the historical exhibition “1945. Not the End, not the Beginning” that between March and September 2025 was on shown in the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (https://polin.pl/en/event/1945-not-end-not-beginning)
*Guests must register by Monday, February 23, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.
This event is co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute
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