Irena Grudzińska-Gross Book order

The contributions in this volume reflect discussions and controversies during the Princeton University Conference on Polish-Jewish Studies (April 18–19, 2015). The debates examined the politics of history in Poland, as well as the scholarly and pedagogical need to move beyond national and diasporic narratives in researching and teaching Polish-Jewish subjects. They focused on the role and meaning of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The book consists of articles from East European Politics and Societies, a journal published in the United States that first appeared in 1987. This selection is composed of papers written by the journal’s founders and early authors, among them Zygmunt Bauman, Tony Judt, Katherine Verdery, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Elemer Hankiss, Vesna Pusic, Maria Todorova. The first section Before the Change consists of texts written in the late 1980s; its authors tried to identify the cracks that would undermine or reform the existing system. In the second part of the book Alternative Futures contributors sketched the directions of the changes as they were just getting underway. The authors hoped that politics, economics, and societies were now free to reinvent themselves. The texts in the third section, Legacies of the Past, written before, during, and after the time of most drastic changes, show how the shadows cast by the histories of individual nations and the region as a whole continued to burden political strategies as well as daily lives.

The volume is a selection of the most incisive analyses related to the issues of gender and social transition that appeared in the pages of the quarterly East European Politics and Societies. The articles look at what was happening to women in the changing East European societies and propose new perspectives on the history of the region. Articles cover many countries and come from a period of twelve years – 1994 to 2006 – when the efforts of introducing gender into East European studies were most intense. The volume shows the trajectory leading from the introduction of the lens of gender into the East European studies to the moment at which the tools of gender analysis were applied without apology to the research on East European politics, law, history, culture and economy.

This 1994 title by the Czecho-Sovak Committee of the European Cultural Foundation reviews the sometimes fraught story of constitutionalism in former East Bloc countries, with reference to participation by these states in European & EU affairs.