Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Dr Kamil Kijek

Fellow Kamil Kijek

July - October 2016
Mail kamil.kijek@gmail.com

Dr Kamil Kijek received his MA in Sociology at the University of Wrocław in 2005. During his doctoral studies, he received fellowships at the Hebrew University, the University of Tel-Aviv, the University of Haifa and University City College of London. In 2014 he received his PhD in History from the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Between September 2014 and June 2015, Kijek was a Prins Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History and NYU Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department in New York. Between July and September 2015, he was a Sosland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Since October 2015, he has been Assistant Professor at the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław.

Research project at the Kolleg

My research project deals with the unique history of the Dzierżoniów post-Holocaust Jewish community in the years 1945-50. In the first years after the Second World War, Jews made up almost half of the inhabitants of the town (12 000 in the summer of 1946). Their visibility, paired with their social, economic and cultural activity, made Dzierżoniów a distinctive place in the landscape of post-war Poland. My research project aims to deal with the central problems of post-war Jewish history in Poland from a new micro-historical perspective. The project intends to enrich the existing explanations and to offer new ideas. Problems such as popular and official anti-Semitism, daily Polish-Jewish relations, emigration, assimilation, secularization, productivization, re-stratification and the communist seizure of power in the Jewish community will be studied from a diachronic and dynamic perspective for the years 1945-50. The problems discussed in the present proposal will be investigated from the perspective of the singular local community of Dzierżoniów.

Main areas of research

  • History of Jews in Poland
  • East-Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century
  • Modern Jewish political cultures
  • History of European political modernism from the end of the nineteeth century until 1945
  • Historical sociology

Positions and Memberships

  • Assistant Professor at the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wrocław
  • Member of the European Association of Jewish Studies
  • Member of the World Union of Jewish Studies

Monographs

Kamil Kijek Dzieci modernizmu. Świadomość i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w Polsce międzywojennej, [Children of Modernism. Political Consciousness and Socialization of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2016)

Articles

Kamil Kijek, 'Between love of Poland, symbolic violence and anti-Semitism. On the idiosyncratic effect of the state education system among the Jewish youth in Interwar Poland', Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018, forthcoming)

Kamil Kijek '"Naród słabych i skrzywdzonych". Wojny i rewolucja lat 1914-1921 w pamięci młodzieży żydowskiej okresu międzywojennego' ["Nation of Week and Harmed". Wars and revolutions of the years 1914-1921 in the Memory of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland], Studia Judaica 34, no.2 (2015): 85-104.

Kamil Kijek, 'Ha radicalism ha politi shel ha noar ha yehudi be shtetl polani bein milhamot haolam' [Political Radicalism of the Shtetl Youth in Interwar Poland], Yalkut Moreshet, 92-93 (April 2013): 20-59.

Kamil Kijek, 'Max Weinreich, Assimilation and the Social Politics of Jewish Nation Building', East European Jewish Affairs" 41, no. 1-2 (2011): 25-55.

Reviews

Kamil Kijek 'Nowe polskie początki masowej żydowskiej polityki' (review of Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners. The Revolution of 1905 and transformation of Warsaw Jewry" (Stanford University Press, 2012), in Kwartalnik Historii Żydów/Jewish Historical Quaterly, 3 (2014): 795-804. Kamil Kijek 'Inteligenstya ptuha, Yehudim ve oyevam. Yehudim ke'nose be historiografia ha liberalit shel inteligenstya polanit' [Open Intelligentsia, Jews and their enemy. Jews as the object of the liberal historiography of Polish Intelligentsia] (review essay of Jerzy Jedlicki, Maciej Janowski, Magda Mycielska, Dzieje inteligencji polskiej do roku 1918' [History of the Polish Intelligentsia until 1918], vol. 1-3, (Neriton, 2008); Helena Datner, Ta i tamta strona. Żydowska inteligencja Warszawy drugiej połowy XIX wieku [This and Other side. Jewish Intelligentsia in Warsaw in the secondo half of XIX century] (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2011), in Gal-Ed 23 (2012): 183-197

Kamil Kijek, Poza wąskie granice historii politycznej chasydyzmu [Beyond the narrow borders of the political history of the Chasidism] (review essay of Marcin Wodziński, Władze Królestwa Polskiego wobec chasydyzmu. Z dziejów stosunków politycznych, [Kingdom of Poland and Chassidism. History of mutual political relations] (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2008), in Kultura i Społeczeństwo 3 (2009): 227-230

The full list of publications can be found here.