User talk:Zero0000/GK

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Some allegations of Grabowski and Klein

Since we are not being told which accusations made by Grabowski and Klein (G&K) will be taken seriously, I will choose a few at random and demonstrate how they fare when subject to analysis. Having studied many of G&K's claims, I believe these examples are representative. My bolding throughout.

Association of WP editors with Nazi stereotypes

"Some statements hint that Jews are racially different from ethnic Poles ... Take the claim in the History of the Jews in Poland article, that Jews have 'specific physical characteristics.' The citation for this sentence is a broken link to a website referencing Nechama Tec. Nechama Tec has said that the Germans used ‘the emotional argument that the Jews of Europe were not simply another ethnic minority, but rather a separate race, with separate and readily distinguishable values and, in particular, physical characteristics.’ Tec never said that Jews looked different, though. Indeed, she emphasized that ‘belying this myth was the fact that the Germans occupying Poland could not, by employing their own distinctions, separate Jew from Christian. There were many stereotypes that Jews in hiding had to be aware of, but it is one thing to be aware of existing stereotypes and quite another to confirm their credibility, as the article seems to do." (G&K, p14)

Looking at the website we find it is a list of difficulties Polish Jews faced in hiding among gentiles, cited to Tec's book. (Tec survived the Holocaust by posing as a Christian.) The relevant item is:

"Appearance-Jews with the physical characteristics of curly black hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, a long nose were in special jeopardy".

Let's first dispose of the behavioral accusation. The history started when Jacurek copy-pasted the whole sentence from the website. Moonriddengirl later flagged it as a copyvio, to which Piotrus responded by paraphrasing "physical characteristics of curly black hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, a long nose, were in special jeopardy" as "specific physical characteristics were particularly vulnerable". That's it, the whole story. Not only was Piotrus just performing a simple policy-demanded clean-up, he was actually removing the details of the stereotype. Moreover, both before and after the edit the sentence clearly does not say that Jews have particular physical characteristics, but only that Jews with those characteristics were in special danger.

But I'm not finished with G&K yet. Here is the passage in Tec's book that the website sentence comes from; you decide why they didn't cite it:

"Who then was likely to contemplate a move to the Aryan side? Who among the Jews did in fact make such a move? Physical attributes played a part in this decision since Poles had a definite image of what a Jew looked like, and some in fact conformed to this image. Among such physically identifying features was a long nose, dark curly hair, dark eyes, and a dark complexion. In contrast, to be blue-eyed and blond, the 'typically Polish look,' was a definite advantage, and those with such an appearance were more receptive to the idea of changing their identity.
In reality, however, not many passing Jews seem to have conformed to this image. My evidence from two separate groups, 308 Jewish survivors and 189 righteous Poles (where such evidence is available), indicates that fewer than 20 percent of these illegal Jews had a typically Polish appear­ance. The majority had neutral features." ( p35)

This is not a great match to G&K's claim that "Tec never said that Jews looked different". But instead they quoted a different passage that appears to support them. But does it? Let's look at the text immediately following the part they quoted:

"There were some Polish Jews who looked and acted like Poles, and many more who though dark-haired and dark-eyed by no means fit the German stereotype. Unfamiliar with Polish culture, the Germans enlisted the aid of some Poles who were willing to help them ferret out passing Jews."( p40)

In other words, Tec is just saying that many Jews could be identified by Poles but not by Germans. So that doesn't support G&K's claim that "Tec never said that Jews looked different" either.

In summary, G&K made a false accusation without evidence and supported it by misrepresenting their source.

References

Explicit accusations of antisemitism

On page 8 of G&K's essay there is a summary of their overall thesis. I'll quote the part I want to comment on:

"Four distortions dominate Wikipedia’s coverage of Polish–Jewish wartime history: ... antisemitic tropes insinuating that ... money-hungry Jews controlled or still control Poland".

"Money-hungry Jews controlled or still control Poland" is indeed a classical antisemitic trope, and it would be a disgrace if Wikipedia promoted it. So we should look at G&K's evidence. However, G&K provide no example of this trope appearing in Wikipedia. I have been unable to locate one either.

Since the trope as a whole does not appear, we can look for the individual parts and ignore the question of whether it is valid to combine them.

• I'm confident that "still control Poland" (present tense) is a G&K invention that does not exist anywhere on WP.
• G&K's "controlled Poland" (past tense) could only be a reference to Poland under communism, since no other form of government control is mentioned. G&K refer to the antisemitic Jews=Communists trope repeatedly, even in their abstract, but the only example they provide is "Poland's postwar Communist government was Jewish-dominated" added by Jacurek more than 15 years ago. They don't mention that it was removed by multiple editors 4 months later, though they do mention on another page that Jacurek was indeffed in 2011.
• The "money-hungry Jews" part also seems to be a G&K invention. The nearest hit is some text about the wealth of Polish Jews in the pre-war period, but "wealthy" does not imply "money-hungry". G&K write:

  "Equally problematic in the same article is the sentence, ‘In many areas of the country, the majority of retail businesses were owned by Jews, who were sometimes among the wealthiest members of their communities.’ Since research on interwar Polish Jewry has shown that most Jews lived in poverty, this emphasis on Jewish wealth misleads readers. The citation to this claim is page 84 in a book by one Peter Stachura, but that page contains no such information. In its original version, inserted in 2008, the sentence had no citation whatsoever and was even more misleading: ‘some Jews were amongst the wealthiest citizens in Poland'." (pp14–15)

Starting at the beginning, Tymek added "some Jews were among the wealthiest citizens of Poland" in 2008, without a source. That was definitely a bad edit, no excuses. The following year, Malik Shabazz added Stachura as a source to the text which had meanwhile lost "of Poland". However, that source does not support the text; the closest is mention of "wealthy and poor Jews" and "they enjoyed, as an overall average, a higher per capita income and thus paid more taxes than ethnic Poles". In a massive cleanup prompted by a copyvio determination, "among the wealthiest citizens" was changed to "among the wealthiest members of their communities". Now it only compared Jews to other Jews, which is a substantial change of meaning but it still isn't present in the source. G&K don't mention that arch-"distortionist" Volunteer Marek was the one who weakened the sentence in this manner.

To say that some members of a Jewish community were the wealthiest in their community is to say nothing, so G&K's assertion that this hides poverty is hard to understand. The "majority of retail businesses" part of the sentence is not in Stachura but it is in G&K's source Marcus (p24). I don't see any problem with those particular sentences in the article as I write. Marcus is a good source for further economic information.

References