The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

“Staunchly Apolitical: On the Usefulness of Being Politically Unaligned

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Kamil Kijek, doctoral student in History at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, explains what a privilege it is to be apolitical, and how past generations' strict ideological commitments veiled the nuances of multicultural life in Interwar Poland.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Kamil Kijek.

This excerpt is in English.

This interview is part of the Yiddish in the Academy: scholars, language instructors, and students series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

My Grandparents’ Attitudes Toward and Uses Of Yiddish

1 min 48 sec

From Military Academy to Jail: My Grandfather, an Assimilated Jew in Soviet Russia

3 min 57 sec

Telling Everyone, To Check: One Teenager's Jewish Identity in Poland

2 min 44 sec

Empathy to Understand “the Other”: On the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw

4 min 14 sec

A Problem, an Instrument, a Recognition: Various Attitudes Toward Jews Within Polish History

3 min 17 sec

More Deeply Engaged in the Space: How Studying Jewish History Has Changed My Experience of Poland

2 min 36 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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