Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust by Yechiel Weizman (review)

Yechiel Weizman's Unsettled Heritage reveals that the near-total disappearance of Poland's Jewish material heritage after the Holocaust was not a passive process but an active, institutionalized effort involving discursive, legal, and symbolic work. Through extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in small towns—rather than major cities like Kraków or Warsaw—Weizman demonstrates how language (e.g., labeling sites as 'abandoned' or 'former') and legal frameworks facilitated the erasure of Jewish memory. He uncovers how antisemitic tropes about sanitation and neglect were weaponized to justify the repurposing or destruction of Jewish sites, while local knowledge gaps expose a 'nonmemory' where traces persist subconsciously. The study challenges narratives of Jewish absence in Poland, showing that forgetting was a deliberate, multi-layered process.

(Ed.). (2024). Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust by Yechiel Weizman (review). AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, 48(1), 256–257. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2024.a926089