About Anti-Semitism

On April 24, we hosted Bożena Umińska – Keff – a writer associated with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the author of a book entitled “Antisemitism – an Unfinished Story”. The writer began the meeting with a short introduction on polytheistic religions and Judaic monotheism as well as Christianity developed from Judaism. She devoted a lot of attention to the Middle Ages in Europe and superstitions about Jews, using iconographic material, and then briefly talked about the Dreyfuss affair in France and the increasing anti-Semitism in Europe after the First World War. She drew attention to the danger of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which today, despite the small Jewish community in Europe (as a result of the Holocaust), has not gone into oblivion. Students asked questions about the origin of the term anti-Semitism, about the social consequences of Jews being culturally rooted in the written word and about constructive criticism of Israeli policy in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

(text: Beata Ciacek; photo: Beata Ciacek)