This paper is part of a larger project, in which I intend to draw a more nuanced picture of the field of Polish-Jewish memory in postcommunist Poland, and do so with the US audience's perspective in mind. I plan to shed light on the factors that have conditioned a range of developments in Poland, which escape the attention of American audiences. In my MSA presentation, I take the vantage point of general US readers who learn about developments in Poland from press coverage. I analyze the coverage of issues pertaining to Polish-Jewish relations in the postcommunist period (1989-present) in major American newspapers such as New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal. My point is not to evaluate what was well covered and what was not, but to analyze the categories used by foreign correspondents who relate Polish events for their domestic audiences in the US. This point of entry prevents me from inadvertently downplaying the importance of some notions which are well-known to scholars of Polish culture and memory, for instance the "Polonization of the Holocaust" (e.g., Leociak, Stola, Lehrer, Snyder). The "Polonization of the Holocaust" became so ingrained in Polish culture that it is practically transparent to the generations of Poles raised in communist Poland. Not surprising it is also a blind spot for the US journalists who report on what they can trace in the country's discourse, not what lies underneath it. Hence, I claim that the legacy of communist politics of history and memory, though deeply influencing political and cultural developments in contemporary Poland and ultimately affecting Poland's political and cultural relationships with other countries, has been escaping both the domestic and international scope of vision.
