In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to
reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic
revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode
of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging
alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly
catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is
characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and
nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally
networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving,
ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh
historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past
with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre
of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating
their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!;
Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance
Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and
ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and
affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not
as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite
participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple
reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of
history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a
range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future
aspirations
