Showing So as Not to See

On July 4, 1946, forty-two Jews were murdered in Kielce, and dozens more were wounded. The eightieth anniversary of the pogrom should be more than another occasion to commemorate its victims. It should also compel us to ask how societies organize the visibility of minorities: when they allow a minority to appear, in what form they display it, and what they remove from view by doing so.

The immediate occasion for raising this question is Dominik Flisiak’s Polish-language article, “Kielce according to Mordechai Canin,” published on Academia.edu. Flisiak recovers the testimony of a Jewish reporter who travelled through Poland after the Holocaust, documenting the remains of one hundred destroyed Jewish communities.

Mordechai Canin, also known as Mordechai Tsanin or Tzanin, מרדכי צאנין, was not a marginal chronicler. He was a writer, journalist, lexicographer, editor of the Israeli Yiddish newspaper Letste Nayes, and an important figure in postwar Yiddish culture in Israel. As a correspondent for the New York Forverts, he returned to Poland to describe the social aftermath of the catastrophe. His major book about that journey has never entered the English-speaking world in its entirety.

The problem, however, is not simply that one author has been forgotten. The problem is that we have forgotten the world in which Canin was not exceptional.

Contemporary Jewish memory has not made the Jews of Poland completely invisible. On the contrary, it has made them extraordinarily visible as victims. We see the trains, ghettos, deportations, selections, camps, and photographs of children being led to their deaths. We see far less of their schools, newspapers, publishing houses, trade unions, yeshivot, theatres, libraries, cooperatives, political parties, and religious movements. We remember them from the moment people began to murder them, while losing sight of the society they had been before.

We remember their deaths so intensely that we cease to see their lives.

This is not ordinary forgetting. Forgetting leaves an empty space. Here, one image is produced as a substitute for another: a particular form of visibility is intensified until it obscures every other form.

Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski identified a similar mechanism in Polish Holocaust memory. The footbridge over Chłodna Street became an emblem of Polish-Jewish relations during the occupation. It presents Jews imprisoned inside the ghetto and Poles on the so-called Aryan side as radically separated by German violence. It is a clear, moving, and safe image. Poles remain spectators.

What disappears from view is nearby Biała Street, which offered one of the routes out of the ghetto and where blackmailers waited for Jews attempting to escape. The visibility of the footbridge produces the invisibility of Biała Street. The Holocaust is not silenced. It is shown in a way that removes an inconvenient social relationship from the field of vision.

The same mechanism appeared in a historical reconstruction of the liquidation of the Będzin ghetto described by Janicka and Żukowski. The roles of Germans and Jews were assigned. The role of the Polish surroundings was not. Contemporary inhabitants could then stand behind a red-and-white barrier and recognize themselves as innocent observers of the event.

History was not removed. It was carefully staged. Only one position within its structure was made to disappear.

This mechanism is universal. It can be activated against any group that a majority has already marked as different. First, one characteristic is made to define the entire person: Jew, Arab, Bedouin, Roma, refugee, migrant, heretic, homosexual, or “illegal” human being. The name ceases to function as a description and becomes an operation of separation.

The group is then made excessively visible in situations that confirm the role assigned to it. It appears as a threat, a demographic problem, an economic burden, a security risk, an object of charity, an exotic culture, or a victim requiring a ceremony.

At the same time, it becomes invisible as a complex world. Its internal conflicts, languages, professions, institutions, schools, political ideas, daily work, loves, ambitions, and projects for the future disappear. The individual is permitted to appear before the majority only in the role prepared by the majority.

Finally, the majority itself disappears as the producer of this field of vision. It can imagine itself as a neutral observer, the guardian of law, the administrator of space, or the defender of security. It does not see that it has already decided who must be watched, which behaviour will be classified as suspicious, and whose voice will be heard as ordinary speech rather than as a threat.

Canin allows us to recognize this mechanism in postwar Poland. During his journey through destroyed towns, Jews were simultaneously hypervisible and radically invisible. They were visible as people returning to claim a house, shop, or workshop now occupied by someone else. They appeared as a demand, a threat to a new distribution of property, an inconvenient witness, or a stranger disturbing the restored local normality.

They remained invisible as legitimate inhabitants, fellow citizens, and co-creators of those towns. The continuity between the person returning in 1946 and the society that had built local institutions, conducted political disputes, and given meaning to the surrounding space over generations had been severed.

Canin did not describe an empty space left by the Jews. He described a world in which Jewish matter remained available, while Jewish presence had ceased to be admissible.

Synagogues could remain standing, but without prayer. Houses could survive, but without their former inhabitants. Cemeteries could remain on the map, while their stones lost protection and meaning. Jewish absence did not produce emptiness. It produced space available for the use of others.

The Kielce pogrom was the culmination of this process. The false accusation of ritual murder did not create the Jew as a stranger in a single morning. It activated an already existing structure of recognition. A person who had survived the Holocaust and returned to the city was shown once again not as a surviving fellow citizen, but as a concealed threat.

This is why Canin is needed in contemporary Israel. Not only as a witness to the Kielce pogrom, and not only as a Yiddish writer. He is needed because the mechanism he exposes does not belong exclusively to Polish history.

This is not an attempt to equate postwar Kielce with contemporary Israel. Such a comparison would be historically irresponsible. The scale of violence, the structures of state power, the political contexts, and the relations between the groups are different. The mechanism that organizes visibility, however, can move between radically different societies.

Israel, a state formed around the experience of a people who had for centuries been marked, classified, and represented as a threat, did not thereby acquire immunity from this mechanism. The memory of our own persecution does not automatically prevent us from adopting the gaze once directed against us.

An Arab citizen of Israel may be a physician, teacher, pharmacist, student, entrepreneur, hospital employee, or neighbour. Within the dominant political field, however, the Arab citizen frequently becomes visible above all as a question of loyalty and security.

The Israel Democracy Index 2024 found that slightly more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents regarded Arab citizens as a threat to national security. Among respondents identifying with the political right, the proportion reached 66 percent. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of Arab respondents expressed a desire to integrate into Israeli society.

Here the mechanism appears in an almost pure form: the minority is made hypervisible as a potential threat and invisible as a society seeking participation.

After October 7, 2023, Israeli civil-rights organizations documented the selective prosecution of Arab citizens for political statements, social-media posts, and protests against the war. Adalah described arrests, disciplinary proceedings, dismissals from employment, and expulsions from academic institutions. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel pointed to unequal enforcement of laws governing expression.

Not every contested statement was innocent or politically insignificant. The essential point is that Arab speech itself increasingly became speech requiring surveillance, explanation, and suspicion.

A Bedouin village can become administratively visible as “illegal construction,” a planning obstacle, or a dispersed population complicating territorial control. It remains invisible as a community possessing a history, family relations, infrastructural needs, and its own right to inhabit space.

In 2025, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the planning-rights organization Bimkom exposed the language of an Israeli planning document in which the presence of Arab and Bedouin communities was presented as a reason for creating new Jewish settlements and “seizing territory.” The residents did not appear in this language as equal citizens inhabiting a shared space, but as a spatial problem requiring management.

The same apparatus can operate against other groups, including groups within Jewish Israeli society. The Haredi becomes visible as someone avoiding military service, supplying coalition votes, or benefiting from public budgets. The Ethiopian Jew appears during protests against police violence or in a celebratory narrative about a rescued community. For decades, the Mizrahi Jew was visible as an immigrant requiring modernization, while remaining less visible as the inheritor of autonomous Arab, Persian, Iraqi, and North African Jewish worlds.

In every case, the sign begins to replace the person. Society no longer has to encounter the actual group. It encounters a figure that has already been prepared.

In relation to Palestinians, this mechanism reaches its most radical form. The Palestinian becomes visible as a target, suspect, crowd, number, threat, or problem requiring a solution. It is much harder for the Palestinian to enter the Israeli field of vision as someone possessing a biography, home, language, family, memory, and project for the future.

This does not require denying genuine threats or violence directed against Israelis. Selective visibility does not invent every danger from nothing. It turns one real characteristic or one real event into the definition of an entire group. Terrorism exists. It does not follow that every Palestinian presence can be exhausted by the category of threat.

At this point, Canin ceases to be only a witness to Poland. He becomes a witness to an Israeli problem.

Israel has learned to remember Jewish death with enormous intensity. It has not always learned to recognize the mechanism that precedes exclusion: the reduction of a person to a sign, the sign to a threat, and the threat to an administrative justification for removing that person’s world.

The memory of the Holocaust becomes ethically alive only when it changes how we see the living. Otherwise, it can be enclosed within ceremonies, monuments, and a national narrative of exceptional suffering. It can display the dead without disturbing any contemporary distribution of visibility.

Canin is needed because he restores Jews not as the objects of someone else’s crime, but as the subjects of their own world. He shows that before the ruins there existed a form of life that was not a preliminary sketch of Israel, a failed version of sovereignty, or a waiting room for departure. The Yiddish world was an autonomous Jewish reality capable of creating its own institutions, political languages, and futures.

Its destruction does not prove that it was a historical mistake.

Restoring Canin therefore does not mean adding another name to the catalogue of memory. It means disrupting an apparatus that allows us to remember millions of victims while no longer seeing the civilization to which they belonged.

The eightieth anniversary of the Kielce pogrom can become the moment of such a disruption. Canin returned to Poland in search of Jews and discovered that their traces were everywhere, while their world could no longer become present. Today, his testimony addresses not only Poland, but Israel as well.

Whom are we showing so intensely that we no longer have to see them?

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig