Limmud Winnipeg 2018

Over the past few decades, Poland has become a hotbed of contemporary Jewish identity debate—in Europe, but perhaps even more so in North America and in Israel, where we fnd so many descendants of Polish Jews. "The Meshugene Effect" is a research-creation project situated in a socio- cultural milieu, which has been receiving much attention in academic and popular circles.
Since the fall of communism, thousands of people in Poland have discovered Jewish roots. Among them is a peculiar category of those, whose discovery was preceded by a ‘hunch’ – an irrational conviction that they were Jewish before they actually knew they were Jewish. Katka Reszke tries to make sense of the personal narratives of several Polish women (including her own), who embarked on a pursuit of Jewish identity following a feeling, an intuition, an uncanny precognition about their Jewish descent. These self-narratives reveal different ways of making sense of extraordinary experiences of memory and transition set against the landscape of troubled Polish-Jewish history and a new curious Polish-Jewish present.