We sat in her candle-lit kitchen for the interview following a Friday night dinner. There was room to move vertically only, popping up to raise wine glasses and declare manifestoes amidst peals of laughter. Feminist conversation spreads beyond private homes into classrooms, cafes, restaurants, the rare and precious hot chocolate parlor, and most dramatically, into the media and onto the streets. Uminska also became a media sensation when, in her article, she drew parallels between anti-Semitism and sexism. Jews are dangerous.
Women are insignificant.
The problem is that in intellectual circles in Poland today, you should not be openly anti-Semitic, but you can be openly misogynist. Uminska zoomed her lens in on the early 20th-century writer Stefan Zeromski, a member of the Polish literary canon. In his acclaimed novel Early Spring , the hero encounters both the Warsaw Jewish ghetto and a peasant village in the Polish countryside. Uminska argued that the narrator displayed a cold cynicism toward the Jews he observed. The entire crowd gave the impression of a council of the condemned possessed by the devil.