Changing the Use of a ‘Jew’ in the Republic of Poland

by Oleksii Bondarev, Nina Gabryś, Elliot Mamet

On 15 June 2015 we started to work on our social campaign on the topic of counteracting anti-Semitic hate speech in Poland. The topic was especially broad, and we struggled to find a place to start. We spent two days trying to clarify the problem. Finally, with the help of our colleagues, we decided to focus on the misuse of the word ‘Jew’ in the Polish language, because it creates some stereotypes and leads to anti-Semitic hate speech. For example, consider how the infinitive ‘to Jew’ is often used as a substitute for ‘to cheat.’ Moreover, it was a feasible idea that can be addressed by work of a group of three people.

We understood from the very beginning that the name of our campaign should be provocative, because a provocative campaign would attract the most attention and thus most effectively expose our message to our target audience. After some reflections the title “Use ‘Jew’ Correctly” was proposed and received positive feedback from the Fellows and members of the Jewish community, as well as HIA Poland staff. 

Our challenges continued: Over the course of two days we tried to draft the concept of our campaign, but a consultant convinced us that we only had an emphatically boring idea and the only good thing we had was the name and slogan of the campaign. This feedback energized us to make our campaign more attractive. 

Working together in a group was really slow. We couldn’t agree on anything except the name of the campaign and were really frustrated. The American approach of putting everything in one document for further discussion didn’t work for us. And every discussion about how to use a ‘Jew’ was a mess. 

Finally we found a balance between all our ideas and decided how we were going to use a ‘Jew’. We launched our Facebook campaign “Use ‘Jew’ Correctly” on Friday, 19 June 2015. And due to Nina’s personal connections, we started to rapidly scale up our visibility. Amazingly, in only four days, we received over 600 likes, and our content was shared and commented on across platforms. We were especially pleased with the engagement with our campaign from the general public and from our target population.

But we still needed more content for our page. One of the problems was shooting a movie. We had one very good idea but due to lack of time and resources we changed our approach and drafted three other scripts. And, what is really cool, we got a professional film crew, again thanks to Nina. With professional it took us two and a half hours to shoot a movie. Elliot had an opportunity to show his acting talent and proficiency in Polish language. Nina was a director of the movies and did her job very well, as you can see on our Facebook page. 

Please feel free to join our campaign and Jew a Jew Jewly. Don’t understand? Go to our Facebook page and our dream team will explain you how to use this word.