Research

Biograms of conference participants

Polscy Żydzi obserwują wjeżdżające do Parczewa wojska niemieckie, fotografia z kolekcji G. Russa, depozyt Stowarzyszenia Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich
Polscy Żydzi obserwują wjeżdżające do Parczewa wojska niemieckie, fotografia z kolekcji G. Russa, depozyt Stowarzyszenia Żydowski Instytut Historyczny w Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN

Click the name to read biogram.
 

 

 

Natalia AleksiunTop of the page

Natalia Aleksiun is  Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She studied East European and Jewish history in Poland, where she received her first doctoral degree at Warsaw University, as well as Oxford, Jerusalem and New York, where she received her second doctoral degree at NYU. She published a monograph titled Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (in Polish), and numerous articles in Yad Vashem Studies, Polish Review, Dapim, East European Jewish Affairs, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Polin, Gal-Ed, East European Societies and Politics, Nashim and German History. She co-edited the 20th volume of Polin, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust and the 29th volume titled Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe. Her book titled Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust will be published by Littman Library in 2019. Among several prestigious fellowships, she was a fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, Germany; Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and Senior Fellow at Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna,  and The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, Washington D.C. Together with Dr. Elissa Bemporad she ran the Scholars’ Working Group on Women and Gender in Jewish History at the Center for Jewish History in New York. She is currently working on a new edition of Gerszon Taffet’s Zagłada Żydów Żółkiewskich, a new book about the so-called cadaver affair at European Universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust..

 

Robert BlobaumTop of the page

Robert Blobaum is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at West Virginia University.  He specializes broadly in the social, political and cultural history of Poland in the first decades of the twentieth century.  His most recent book is A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War (2017).  He is also the editor of Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (2005)and author of Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (1995) and Feliks Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism (1984).  He has served on the executive boards of the Association for Slavic, East European and American Studies and the Polish Studies Association, and is currently the president of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.  A past recipient of the Oskar Halecki Prize for the best book in Polish history (for Rewolucja), Blobaum is a multiple Fulbright grant recipient and his research has also been supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.  He is currently engaged in a collaborative project on Polish-Jewish small towns in the Warsaw region in the first half of the twentieth century..

 

Jochen BöhlerTop of the page

Jochen Böhler is a Senior Research Fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, where he teaches courses on the history of modern Central and Eastern Europe. In 20I7, he was Invited Professor for "The Europe of Wars and the Traces of War" at the Chair d‘Excellence, LabEx EHNE at Sorbonne University (Paris-I). His most recent publications include War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (2014) alongside Jürgen Matthäus and Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War (2014) with Joachim von Puttkamer and Włodzimierz Borodziej, and The Waffen-SS: A European History (2016) with Robert Gerwarth. These days, Oxford University Press publishes his book Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921. The Reconstruction of Poland, which describes the battle for independence of nation states on the ruins of the fallen European land empires.

 

David EngelTop of the page

David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University.  He has written extensively on various aspects of Jewish political and intellectual history during the first half of the twentieth century, including Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust.  His books include: In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews 1939-1942 (1987); Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews 1943-1945 (1993); Between Liberation and Flight: Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership 1944-1946 (Hebrew, 1996); The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (2000); Zionism: A Short History of a Big Idea (2008); Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (2010); and most recently The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard (2016).  He also edited Spowiedź by Calek Perechodnik, published by Ośrodek KARTA in 2004.  Between 1985 and 2016 he edited sixteen volumes of the series Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jews, published by Tel Aviv University.  He is currently at work on a study of the problem of security in Jewish history and is preparing a retrospective anthology of his articles on Polish-Jewish relations published over the past thirty-five years.

 

Christhardt HenschelTop of the page

Christhardt Henschel works at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. His research interests include Polish history in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Jews in East-Central Europe. Currently he is engaged in research for the project Northern Mazovia; between Polish Statehood and German occupying power in the mid-20th century. Among his publications are: “Frontline Soldiers into Farmers. Military Colonisation in Poland after the First and the Second World War’, [in:] Hannes Siegrist/Dietmar Müller (ed.), Property in Eastern Europe. The Notion, Institutions, and Practices of Property to Land in the 20th Century, New York/Oxford 2015, pp. 144–162, “Einführung”, [in:] Juden im Militär. Erfahrung und Erinnerung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Schwerpunkt im Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 2013, pp. 95–104, “Nationalisierung und Pragmatismus. Staatliche Institutionen und Minderheiten in Polen 1918–1939”, [in:] Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 62 (2013) 2, pp. 164–186 (together with Stephan Stach), “Jabłonna als Erinnerungsikone: Juden in den polnischen Streitkräften 1918–1939”, [in:] Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 9 (2010), pp. 545–571. 

 

Kamil KijekTop of the page

Kamil Kijek is Assistant Professor at the Judaic Studies Department, University of Wrocław. His scholarly interests include the problems of contemporary politics and Jewish awareness in the twentieth century, especially in East-Central Europe and the Middle East, as well as transnational relations between Jewish communities in the above mentioned regions, and in North America. He is also interested in political modernism, political violence and the relation between social theory, political history, and social and cultural history, as well as the relation between everyday culture and mass politics. He is author of, i.a., Dzieci modernizmu. Świadomość, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w Polsce międzywojennej, (2017); Between Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence and Anti-Semitism. On the Idiosyncratic Effect of the State Education System Among the Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland (2018), Was It Possible to avoid ‘Hebrew Assimilation’? Hebraism, Polonization, and the Zionist ‘Tarbut’ School System in the Last Decade of Interwar (2016). Kamil is currently engaged in research on the history of the Jewish community of Dzierżoniów and its links with the centres of the Jewish world in the years 1945-1950. He is also about to publish a number of articles devoted to the topic of anti-Jewish violence in interwar Poland.

 

Jerzy Kochanowski

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Jerzy Kochanowski is professor at the Institute of History, University of Warsaw and editor-in-chief of Przegląd Historyczny. In the years 2000-2005 he worked at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw; currently he was  a visiting fellow at the Imre-Kertesz-Kolleg in Jena. Jerzy specializes in modern political and social history of Poland and Eastern Europe. He published, i.a., Węgry. Od ugody do ugody 1867-1990 (1997), W polskiej niewoli. Niemieccy jeńcy wojenni w Polsce 1945-1950 (2001), Zanim powstała NRD. Polska wobec radzieckiej strefy okupacyjnej Niemiec 1945-1949 (2008), Tylnymi drzwiami. „Czarny rynek” w Polsce 1944-1989 (2010), Rewolucja międzypaździernikowa. Polska 1956-1957 (2017).

 

Artur MarkowskiTop of the page

Artur Markowski is senior historian at POLIN  Museum of the history of Polish Jews and Assistant Professor at the Historical Institute University of Warsaw, Poland.  His research interest lies in social history of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, including the history of Russian and Polish Jewry. He is author of two books titled Między Wschodem a Zachodem. Rodzina i  gospodarstwo domowe Żydów Suwalskich w I połowie XIX wieku. Warszawa (2008).(2008) and Przemoc antyżydowska i wyobrażenia społeczne. Pogrom białostocki 1906 roku (2018). Artur has published a number of  papers on anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, e.g. “Anti – Jewish Pogroms in the Polish Kingdom”(2015).

 

Antony Polonsky

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Antony Polonsky is emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial collegium of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3 1914 to 2008  (2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014). In 2011 he was awarded  the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania.

 

Eugenia Prokop-JaniecTop of the page

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec—Professor at the Faculty of Anthropology of Literature and Culture Studies at the Department of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Historian of literature and culture, editor of the series „Studia Polsko-Żydowskie” (Jagiellonian University Publishing House), Eugenia’s main research interests include contemporary literature, literary criticism and the press. She specializes in Polish-Jewish literature and Polish-Jewish cultural contacts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Author of works devoted to the issues of national and cultural identity, nationalism, diaspora, processes of cultural hybridization, literary representation of ethnicity and race, literatures of ethnic borderlands, as well as popular literature and culture. She published, i.a. Międzywojenna literatura polsko-żydowska jako zjawisko kulturowe i artystyczne (1992, translated into English as Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years, 2003), Literatura i nacjonalizm. Twórczość krytyczna Zygmunta Wasilewskiego (2004), Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie. Topografie i teksty (2013). Currently, Eugenia works on the collection of works by Stefan Pomer, a Polish-Jewish poet, and a series of studies on women’s new literature.

 

Marcos SilberTop of the page

Marcos Silber is Senior Lecturer (American equivalent: Associate Professor) at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, Chairman of the Department of Jewish History as well as the head of the Program for the Study of Polish-Jewish History and Culture. On the core of his academic interest is the relation between citizenship and ethnicity. He has written on Jewish Diaspora Nationalism in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia in early 20th century; on Yiddish and Polish cinema and popular culture in inter-war Poland and on Polish-Israeli relations and mutual migrations. His Major Publications includes DifferentNationality, Equal citizenship! The Efforts to Achieve Autonomy for Polish Jewry during the First World War (Hebrew, Tel Aviv 2014) and with Szymon Rudnicki: Polish-Israeli Diplomatic Relations, a selection of documents (1945 -1967) (Polish version Warsaw 2009, Hebrew version Jerusalem 2009). Silber edited a collection of documents on Jewish National Councils in Eastern Europe in 1917-1919 that is scheduled to appear in 2019 in the frame of the series Archive of Jewish History and Culture. Now is preparing a book on the transference of motifs and practices between Polish Nationalism and Zionism.

 

Stephan Stach

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Stephan Stach is a historian at the Institute of Modern History, Czech Academy of Sciences. His academic interests include Polish-Jewish relations in the 20th century, national minorities in Eastern Europe and the history of dissidents from East-Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2015, Stephan has received his PhD thesis on the ideas and practices of inclusion of national minorities in interwar Poland. He was one of the leaders of a scholarly project on historical debates among the dissidents from East-Central Europe. Among his most important publications are: Nationalitätenpolitik aus der zweiten Reihe. Konzepte und Praktiken zur Einbindung nationaler Minderheiten in Piłsudkis Polen (1926-1939) (due to print in 2019); together with Y. Kleinmann & T. Wilson: Religion in the Mirror of Law. Eastern European Perspectives from the Early Modern Period to 1939 (2016); together with P. Hallama: Gegengeschichte. Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (2015). Currently Stephan researches the role of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in shaping the memory of the Jewish Holocaust during the Cold War.

 

Darius StaliūnasTop of the page

Darius Staliūnas is a deputy director at the Lithuanian Institute of History (since 2000). He is the editor of Lithuanian Studies Series at Academic Studies Press (Boston, USA). He teaches at Vilnius University. Darius is the author of Making Russians. Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (2007); Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars (2015); and Lithuanian Nationalism and the Vilnius Question, 1883-1940 (2015) co-author – Dangiras Mačiulis. He also co-edited The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews (2004); with Alvydas Nikžentaitis and Stefan Schreiner, Pragmatic Alliance. Jewish-Lithuanian Political Cooperation at the Beginning of the 20th Century (2011), with Vladas Sirutavičius, and Spatial Concepts of Lithuania in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016). He is a member of the editorial board of many academic journals, including Ab ImperioNordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte, Prace Historyczne, Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, Lithuanian Historical Studies His research interests include issues of Russian nationality policy in the so-called Northwestern Region (Lithuania and Belorussia), ethnic conflicts as well as problems of places of memory in East Central Europe.

 

Dariusz Stola

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Dariusz Stola, director of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, is a historian and Professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published ten books and more than a hundred articles on the history of Polish-Jewish relations, the communist regime in Poland and international migrations in the 20th century, including: Nadzieja i zagłada (1995); Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (2000); Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski 1948-1989 (2010); Patterns of Migration in Central Europe (2001, with C. Wallace); PRL. Trwanie i zmiana (2003, with M. Zaremba); PZPR jako machina władzy (2012, with K. Persak), and three history textbooks for secondary schools. His books received numerous awards. Dariusz has lectured in history and served on advisory boards of several Polish and international institutions and journals. For his contribution to research on Poland’s modern history he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

 

Tamara SztymaTop of the page

Tamara Sztyma is an art historian, graduate of the Warsaw University and the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has received her PhD dissertation on the work of sculptor Henryk Glicenstein at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. . Author of articles and publications about Jewish artists in the 19th and 20th century. In 2008-2013 Tamara was one of the curators of the core exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, working on the interwar gallery. Since opening of the core exhibition, she has been working as a curator of temporary exhibitions at POLIN Museum.    

 

Michał Trębacz

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Michał Trębacz is head of the Research Department at POLIN Museum. He obtained his PhD in history, and his research interests include twentieth-century socio-political history, in particular Jewish history and biographical studies. Dr Trębacz was granted a number of international scholarships to further research the interwar history and the history of WW2. He published a book titled: Izrael Lichtenstein (1883-1933). Biografia żydowskiego socjalisty, and edited two volumes: Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji and Józef Zelkowicz. Notatki z getta łódzkiego (1941-1944).

 

Theodore R. WeeksTop of the page

Theodore R. Weeks is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.  He teaches courses in modern world, European, and Russian history. He has also taught at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw) and the University of Warsaw (Poland).  Among his works are Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (1996), From Assimilation to Antisemitism: the “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850-1914 (2006), and Vilnius between Nations 1795-2000 (2015).  He is presently working on a history of radio in interwar Poland (1920-1939).

 

Piotr WróbelTop of the page

Piotr Wróbel holds the Konstanty Reynart Chair of Polish Studies at the History Department of the University of Toronto. Before his appointment in 1994, he taught at the University of Warsaw, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan State University at East Lansing, and at the University of California at Davis. He obtained his Ph. D. from the University of Warsaw in 1984 and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of European History at Mainz, at Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford, and at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. His field of expertise is a history of national minorities in East Central Europe, particularly the Jewish minority. Chronologically, he is interested in the 20th century, however, his research focus on the First World War. He also studies the issues of violence and nationalism. His most important works are: “The Seeds of Violence. The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917-1921,” Journal of Modern European History (2003), Nation and History. Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. with Peter Brock and John D. Stanley (2006); and The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy, ed. with M. B. B. Biskupski and James S. Pula (2010). Currently, he works on a one-volume history of the Jews of Poland, which will cover the era between the 10th and the 21st centuries.

 

Maciej ZakrockiTop of the page

Maciej Zakrocki: The  author  and co-author of hundreds of TV series and  documentaries dedicated to history, mostly to the twentieth century. In recent years, he co-authored and hosted a popular series broadcast on TVP Historia titled Disputes on History. In total, he hosted 136 television programs! For 20 years Maciej acted as a producer and presenter of hundreds current affairs programs:  Debata po Europejsku, a series produced for 9 years at the European Parliament. Between 1997 and 2008 producer of 500 hundred episodes of a journalistic series titled Forum – the experience he later described in the book Forum 500. He was a witness and then producer and presenter of programs covering the process of Poland joining NATO the EU. His book Przepustka do Europy [A Pass to Europe],  published in 2014, was devoted to precisely that.Author of numerous TV interviews with the leading Polish and European politicians: Lech Wałęsa, Donald Tusk, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Jerzy Buzek, Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, Lech Kaczyński, Bronisław Komorowski, Leszek Miller, Waldemar Pawlak, Richard von Weizsäcker, Guy Verhostadt, David Cameron, Michail Saakaschwili, Jose Barroso, Hans Gert Pöttering, Pat Cox , Martin Schulz,  etc. For over 4 years Maciej has hosted popular programs on TOK FM Radio, and has written articles for popular weeklies such as Polityka or Newsweek.

 

Andrei ZamoiskiTop of the page

Andrei Zamoiski  is a historian, born in Minsk, Belarus. A visiting researcher at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute, Freie Universität Berlin since 2016, Andrei graduated from the Gomel State University (1999), the Belarusian State University in Minsk (2002). In 2002 -2003 he worked as a lecturer at the Chair of History of the Gomel State University and studied in 2003-2007 at the Graduate School for Social Research of the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. In 2008, he received his PhD degree at the University of Bialystok (Poland). From 2009 to 2014 he worked as an employee of the Belarusian Research Centre for Electronic Records in Minsk. 2014-2016, he worked as a researcher within the CENDARI project (the Collaborative European Digital Archival Research Infrastructure) at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. Andrei Zamoiski is the author of a monograph on transformation of shtetls in Belarus in the interwar period, publications on history of Soviet Jews, history of Belarus after the First World War, history of Soviet psychiatry and psychiatrists, eugenics in the Soviet Union, etc. Now he is working on his second book on Soviet Jewish physicians in the interwar period. Most important publications: Transformacjia miesteczek Sowietskoj Belarusi. 1918-1939 [The Transformation of small towns in Soviet Belarus, 1918-1939], Minsk: Verlag Logwinov 2013; Military Pogroms, Jewish self-defense units and the new order in the Belarusian lands, 1918 -1921, in: Tim Buchen, Frank Grelka (Hrsg.), Akteure der Neuordnung. Ostmitteleuropa und das Erbe der Imperien, 1917-1924, Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, Bd. 4, Berlin: epubli 2016, 113-130; Eugenics on the Periphery: or why a ‘Belarusian Eugenic Project’ did not Come True (1918-44), in: Acta Poloniae Historica, 2016, nr 114, S. 59-84.

 

Konrad ZielińskiTop of the page

Konrad Zieliński is Professor and Head of the Faculty of Studies on Ethnicity, Department of Political Science, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. He specializes in the history and culture of Jews in Poland and Russia, selected aspects of the USSR national policy, migration processes, as well as ethnic and inter-religious relations. He is deputy head of the Programming Board at the Jewish Historical Institute. His scholarly output comprises about 150 publications, including several monographs and edited volumes, among them: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej (2005); O Polską Republikę Rad. Działalność polskich komunistów w Rosji Radzieckiej 1918-1922 (2013); The Lost World. Polish Jews. Photographs from 1918-1939 (co-author, 2015). His research focuses on, i.a., anti-Jewish pogroms in Galicia in the first years of Polish independence.

 

Joshua D. ZimmermanTop of the page

Joshua D. Zimmerman is Professor of History and the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University in New York. He is the author of The Polish Underground and the Jews1939-1945(2015), which appeared in a revised and updated Polish edition, Polskie Państwo Podziemne I Żydzi w czasie II wojny światowej (2018).  He is also the author of  Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia (2004) and the editor of two contributed volumes: Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (2003) and Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (2005).

 

Jolanta Żyndul Top of the page

Jolanta Żyndul is a historian specializing in the history of Jews in Poland and Polish-Jewish relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. She researches antisemitism (with particular attention to pogroms and blood libel legends) as well as the political aspects of Polish-Jewish co-existence (project on national-cultural autonomy, Zionist activity in the Polish parliament, activity of Apolinary Hartglas). Jolanta has worked at the University of Warsaw and at POLIN Museum; she is currently a scholar at the Jewish Historical Institute, working on a two-volume publication dedicated to Józef Piłsudski’s relations with Jews. Jolanta is author of: „Zajścia antyżydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935-1937”, Warszawa 1994, „Państwo w państwie? Autonomia narodowo-kulturalna w Europie Środkowowschodniej w XX wieku”, Warszawa 2000, „Kłamstwo krwi. Legenda mordu rytualnego na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku”,  Warszawa 2011.