Warsaw
Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and List of cities and towns in Poland, largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the Vistula, River Vistula in east-central Poland. Its population is officially estimated at ...
antisemitism
Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...
.
Life
After 1976 Alina Cała collaborated with the
Workers' Defence Committee
The Workers' Defense Committee ( , KOR) was a Polish civil society group that was established to give aid to prisoners and their families after the June 1976 protests and ensuing government crackdown. It was a precursor and inspiration for efforts ...
folk high school
Folk high schools (also ''adult education center'') are institutions for adult education that generally do not grant academic degrees, though certain courses might exist leading to that goal. They are most commonly found in Nordic countries and i ...
in Zbrosza Duża, perhaps the first institution for adult education to be independent from the Communist authorities since the end of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
. After 1989 she has been a feminist and pro-choice activist. She collaborates with the Greens 2004 party.
As a historian, Alina Cała focuses mostly on Polish-Jewish relations in the last two centuries. Among her most important works is the ''Assimilation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland (1864-1897)'' (published in 1989). Her most cited work is ''The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture'' (1st edition 1987), also published since in English. In recent years she published a variety of historical books on modern Polish-Jewish history, notably the ideological views of the last generation of Jewish-Polish youth before the war, and the Polish-Jewish history between 1944 and 1968.
In a 2009 interview with the Polish newspaper '' Rzeczpospolita'', Cała said that Poles shared responsibility for the deaths of the 3 million Jews murdered in Poland during the Nazi Holocaust. In a 2016 interview with ''
Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (, abbreviated IPN) is a Polish state research institute in charge of education and archives which also includes two public prosecutio ...