2024 Recipient

Sarah Cramsey

Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the "Ethnic Revolution" in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946

The Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies (formerly the Orbis Book Prize), established in 1996 and sponsored by the Kulczycki family, former owners of the Orbis Books Ltd. of London, England, is awarded annually for the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs, published in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Sarah Cramsey, Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946 (Indiana University Press, 2023) 

In Uprooting the Diaspora, Sarah A. Cramsey elegantly and engagingly traces the revolutionary changes in thinking about Jewish territorial belonging that occurred among Jewish and non-Jewish East Central Europeans between 1936 and 1946. While many Jewish thinkers began the war imagining a postwar period in which Jews would remain rooted in Poland and Czechoslovakia, she argues, by the end of that conflict, a consensus about the need to uproot the diaspora for a new Jewish homeland in Palestine had begun to take hold. Using a breathtaking array of archives from five countries, Cramsey painstakingly reconstructs how and why this change occurred, showing her readers that it was by no means an inevitable result of the Holocaust. Indeed, Cramsey illuminates how new meanings of Jewish belonging emerged in ways that were deeply entwined with the broader “ethnic revolution” that was occurring in East Central Europe. Through lively, accessible prose that follows fleshed-out characters as their bodies and ideas traverse multiple global borders, she provides a model of transnational scholarship that prioritizes an inclusive, pluralistic, and entangled narrative of Jewish and East Central European histories. 

Prize Committee: Kathryn Ciancia (chair), Stanley Bill, and Anna Grzymala-Busse