Ania Szyba

Studied cultural studies at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder and Jewish history at Warsaw University as part of an exchange program.

2010-2015 Worked at the Center for Yiddish Culture (Warsaw) as a project manager and Yiddish teacher.

Since 2015 scholarship holder of the Ludwig Rosenberg Kolleg.

PhD Project

The education of an intellectual worker - the view of socialist-minded Jews in interwar Poland on worldwide pedagogical trends (Working Title)

The main objective of my work is to analyze the educational concepts and methods as applied by Jewish educational institutions and establishments close to the socialist movement in Poland, against the background of the worldwide upheavals in the field of pedagogy that were changing nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. In doing so, I will address the question of the extent to which the new pedagogy, particularly German reform pedagogy, influenced the socialist education of Jewish youth in Poland. Within the framework of the thesis, I will examine the extent of these influences, while it remains to be discussed how modern educational methods were adapted to the practice of educating Jewish youth in a socialist sense. The analysis will focus on the period 1916/1918-1939. I assume that in developing new methods of youth work in Poland, Jewish ideologists, pedagogues and psychologists were strongly influenced by the methods and theories emerging simultaneously in the United States and in Western Europe. Thus, the main purpose of the present study can be described as an attempt to determine the existence of transnational networks and interconnections based on the transfer of ideas and educational concepts that took place between Western and Eastern Europe. This transfer of educational ideas has received little attention from previous research on Polish-German-Jewish history, although it bears witness to the cultural diversity of Jewish identities in Eastern Europe, their openness to the new trends, and ultimately to their modernity. The intense disputes between Jewish socialist educators during the period under study show that Poland at that time became a "battlefield of ideas," where not only the "old" clashed with the "new," the "retarded" with the "progressive," but also Eastern and Western European ideals clashed productively.