Magda Teter, Author at Public Seminar

Have We Scholars of Anti-Semitism Failed to Facilitate Empathy for Its Victims?

What we can learn from scholars of anti-Black racism

October 18, 2023 • by Magda Teter

For almost a century, most of us have focused on dissecting anti-Semitic ideas and ideologies. But—with the very important exception of those studying the Holocaust—we have not paid enough attention to the impact these ideas, images, and actions have on Jews as human beings....

Collective Amnesia in Post-Communist Poland

Why history, not memory or mythology, is the path to Polish-Jewish reconciliation

June 14, 2019 • by Magda Teter

After WWII, many European countries engaged in what some scholars dubbed “collective amnesia.” Austria, for example, began to redefine itself as the first victim of the Nazis. France amplified the Resistance, forgetting about its Vichy days; Western Germany, after the trials of several high-profile Nazi leaders, allowed for silence to ...

How Jewish Was Polish History?

David Stromberg Interviews Magda Teter About I.B. Singer, Jews, and Poland.

September 3, 2018 • by David Stromberg and Magda Teter

Magda Teter [MT]: Soon after Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Literatura na świecie, a literary monthly predominantly interested in world literature, devoted a portion of its April 1979 issue to Isaac Bashevis Singer. This marked a turning point for a discussion about Polish Jewish history and culture, ...