Obrońcy wiary. Węzłowe spory o polsko-żydowską przeszłość od 2015 roku
Defenders of the Faith. Key disputes over the Polish-Jewish past since 2015

Summary/Abstract: In 2020 Jelena Subotić published an article devoted to the appropriation of Holocaust memory in post-communist Eastern Europe, where history has become the “handmaiden of populism”. Subotić analyses the central role that collective memory played in the establishment ofpopulism and the rise to power of right-wing movements in Europe, pointing to 2010 as the starting point of these tendencies. She concludes that appropriations of the past stand at the core of populistic resentment. Similar diagnosis of the Polish discourse was posed by Kornelia Kończal, who described these phenomena with the term mnemonic populism, which transforms various available and pluralistic politics of memory into uniform and homogenous populistic propaganda. The year 2015 marks the beginning of a radical and fundamental reorientation of Polish state memory politics, as well as of narratives generated by dominant symbolic elites, on the Polish-Jewish past. The aim of this text is to outline and categorize this phenomenon with the theoretical category of katoendecja (catholic national democracy) coined by Jan Tomasz Gross. Far from having the ambition to systematically analyse the discourse on Polish-Jewish past produced since 2015, the author would just like to point out key moments of these debates and to offer preliminary interpretation as a contribution to further studies.

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