Скачать или смотреть Shaping Polish Jewish Studies: 60 Years of Littman Library’s Publications

Among the 200 titles Littman has published, a significant number have focused on the Jewish history of Poland. The annual series Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, now in its 37th volume, is undoubtedly its best-known contribution, but a wide range of other books have made Littman possibly the foremost publisher in the area. Specialist studies have included works on art history, Hasidic life and thought, rabbinic biographies, religious movements, social histories, synagogue architecture, women’s education, and yeshivas.

Our guest speakers, Professors Natalia Aleksiun, Shaul Stampfer, and Marcin Wodzińnski, contributing authors and editors of Polin, will join Chief Editor, Professor Antony Polonsky, in a discussion about the impact of the Library’s publications on the development of Polish Jewish studies and its influence on current research in the field.

Welcoming Remarks

Connie Webber, Managing Editor, Littman Library

Prof. Natalia Aleksiun,
University of Florida at Gainesville

Prof. Emeritus Shaul Stampfer,
Hebrew University

Prof. Marcin Wodziński,
University of Wrocław

In conversation with

Prof. Antony Polonsky, Co-chair of Polin’s Editorial Board, Chief Historian, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

11:00 am PSDT
1:00 pm CDT
2:00 pm ESDT
8:00 pm CET
9:00 pm IST


Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on the Holocaust and its aftermath, Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish childhood, and the history of medicine. She holds doctoral degrees from the University of Warsaw and New York University. Dr. Aleksiun has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. In addition to her book, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians Before the Holocaust (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021), she is the author of Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (Warsaw, 2002) and editor of Gershon Taffet’s The Destruction of the Jews of Zolkiew (Warsaw, 2019). She co-edited several academic volumes, including European Holocaust Studies, vol. 3: Places, Spaces, and Voids in the Holocaust (2021), Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023), Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 36: Jewish Childhood in Eastern Europe (2023), and The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2024). She serves as an editor of East European Jewish Affairs. Aleksiun is completing a monograph on Jews in hiding in Western Ukraine during the Holocaust, and the so-called Cadaver Affair in medical schools in East Central Europe between the two world wars.

Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of Global Education Outreach Project of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, author of Politics in Independent Poland (1972), The Little Dictators (1975), The Great Powers and the Polish Question (1976), co-author of A History of Modern Poland (1980) and The Beginnings of Communist Rule in Poland (1981) and co-editor of Contemporary Jewish writing in Poland: an anthology (2001) and The neighbors respond: the controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (2004). His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3, 1914 to 2008 (Oxford, 2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History (2014), which has been translated into French, Polish and Lithuanian.


Shaul Stampfer grew up in Portland, Oregon, and earned a B.A. from Yeshiva College in New York. After a year of study in a yeshiva in Israel and a year as a visiting student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Shaul remained at the Hebrew University to complete a Ph.D. with a dissertation on the Lithuanian yeshivot. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States, Shaul returned to the Hebrew University. In 1989, he directed the Center for Jewish Studies in Moscow for two and a half years. Stampfer’s research spans a wide range of topics, including the demographic history of East European Jewry, the cultural histories of bagels and falafel, and the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. In retirement, he has continued to publish on themes such as the custom of kest, the secularization of East European Jewry, and the impact of the Union Pacific Railroad on Russian Jewish history.

Connie Webber has been the managing editor of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization since 1988. She became involved in Polish­Jewish relations in the 1990s and in 1999 the Polish government awarded her a Silver Cross of Merit for her contribution. Since 2011 she has lived in Kraków with her husband Jonathan Webber, and in 2021 she became a Polish citizen. She continues to be a council member of the Institute for Polish­Jewish Studies.