ABSTRACT
In March 1968, Poland witnessed the largest antisemitic campaign in Europe after the Holocaust. Thousands of Polish Jews lost their jobs, even more were driven out of the country, and dozens took their lives after they had found themselves publicly vilified. According to the government, however, there was no trace of antisemitism in Poland: the campaign targeted not Jews, they said, but a Zionist ‘fifth column’. Simon Gansinger examines the left-wing anti-Zionist frenzy that decimated Poland’s Jewish community and assesses the ways in which anti-Zionism functions as a political inflection of antisemitism. The campaign of 1968, Gansinger concludes, ‘exemplifies the ideological innovation that anti-Zionism brings to antisemitism: the apprehension of the political conspiracy’.
