“Am I Jewish?” and “What Does it Mean?”: The Jewish Flying University and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Counterculture in Late 1970s Warsaw

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"Am I Jewish?" and "What Does it Mean?":The Jewish Flying University and the Creation of a Polish-Jewish Counterculture in Late 1970s Warsaw Rachel Rothstein (bio) Describing the atmosphere in late 1970s Warsaw, Konstanty Gebert, a member of the "March '68 Generation" and one of the leaders of today's Polish-Jewish community, said: Try to imagine Warsaw in the late 1970s where doing something oppositional was the in thing, right? I mean, if you weren't collecting money for political prisoners or distributing underground newspapers, or at least participating in a Flying University, you basically ruled yourself out of the company of anybody you wanted. And since this had all been going on for two years, three years, the run of the mill flying university… this was something new, something sexy.1 When Gebert said "something new, something sexy," he was referring to a group of young Poles who began to gather every other week in Warsaw in the fall of 1979 to discuss Jewish topics. Calling th

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