It is interesting to me. I think the first time I stumbled upon this when I realized that Martin Indyk is not automatically a Polish last name ( despite Martin's family having immigrated from Poland ). Indik is very much Yiddish. And when you think of it, it should not be a surprise, Poland used to have a vibrant Jewish community before the war.
As a Jew from Belarus, I don’t feel bad about it. I generally feel trying to correct such large scale injustices is an ineffective way to heal and move past things. We all get born into random circumstances.
> As a Jew from Belarus, I don’t feel bad about it. I
> generally feel trying to correct such large scale injustices
> is an ineffective way to heal and move past things. We all
> get born into random circumstances.
Then what are the effective ways to heal and move past things? Or to help others heal and move past things?
Despite Jews moving past things, there exists a large population today who wasn't taught by their grandparents to move on, but rather to demand restitution for perceived injustices of the 1940's. Are their claims invalidated because your family healed and moved past things? We was your family able to heal and move past things when they cannot?
My family was lucky & took advantage of opportunities to escape to the West in '91. In terms of healing, just time. Focusing on the future, building a family, improving ones own situation etc. Belarus is a distant memory for my family. My dad's passing is a more memorable & traumatic event in my life than any systemic injustices my family faced.
That being said, I don't claim to speak for all Jews & telling people to "get over it" would be tone deaf. I can only try to present my own life experiences, limited as they are. Open to hearing others of course.
Adam Rasugea's video "Why the turkey is named after Turkey (and India)" is extremely informative and fun on the etymology of 'turkey' as applied to the bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2XZiREio4I
This is false. "Pale of Settlement" refers to part of the Russian Empire and, while some of what is today Poland was then controlled by the Russian Empire, other parts of Poland were under Prussian or Austrian control (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland).
The Russian empire contained Poland up to and beyond Warsaw. That is by any reasonable definition a large part of Poland. This is a ridiculously pedantic and pointless argument
There was no pre 20th century Poland! The pale is the same as the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth (mostly), minus Habsburg Galicia and the Prussian part of Poland. The nobility of the polish Lithuanian commonwealth were mostly polish or German speaking (and thus there is very little lithuanian or Belarusian in Yiddish even though a huge number of Jews lived in the Lithuanian part of the commonwealth)
Of course there was. The commonwealth was established in 1385, while Poland as a state came into existence effectively in 966, when Mieszko I adopted Christianity.
10% of Poland citizens were Jewish. Not it is like half a percent or something like that.
Interestingly, only around 3% of German citizens were Jewish. Holocaust is mostly eastern Europwan Jews, because Germany did not had that many of them.
