Ever since Joseph’s invitation to Egypt turned opportunity into slavery, the Jewish experience in host countries has been fraught with paradox. This class focuses on Poland as a case study in the complexities of diaspora life—where Jews were at times welcomed, granted rights and autonomy, and at other times marginalized, attacked, and persecuted. We’ll explore modern-day Poland, where Jewish cultural revivals are often led by non-Jews, even as the country wrestles with confronting its historical truths. Through the eyes of a frequent visitor tracing her family’s Holocaust history, we’ll consider how memory, belonging, and rejection continue to shape our understanding of Jewish life in lands once called home.

Judy Rakowsky is the author of the critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Jews in the Garden that the New York Times said, “reads like a thriller” and which was an editor’s choice of the New York Times book review. She spent decades on deadline as an award-winning investigative reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, People Magazine, the Providence Journal, and other outlets. As a young reporter she got to know Cousin Sam, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto and Nazi concentration camps who later raised a family in Ohio. She traveled again and again to Poland with Sam in pursuit of a cousin who survived the massacre of her family in hiding with brave Poles. Describing those discoveries—the true history of what happened to these relatives—was outlawed in 2018 by the Polish government. Coverage of Jews in the Garden can be found in The New York Times, NPR’s Book of the Day, USA Today, Boston Globe Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Providence Journal, and other outlets. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Sam.