Nominating Bieganski

Dear Stephen M. Leahy, Awards Committee Chair,

We, the undersigned, nominate Bieganski the Blog for the PAHA Skainy Civic Achievement Award. We understand that there is no cash prize for this award. We hope that the award will serve to highlight the important work of Bieganski the Blog, and encourage other Polonians to take up this work.

Bieganski the Blog is doing work that no other Polonian individual or entity is doing. It is refuting, in scholarly, publication-quality blog posts, the Brute Polak stereotype that is currently used to distort immigration history, race relations, Christian-Jewish relations, the Holocaust, and World War Two history. Bieganski the Blog has also presented an action plan for the wider Polonian community to take up this work. Bieganski the Blog is not just about politics. It has featured literary essays, poetry, and memoirs.

Bieganski the Blog has existed since 2010. The primary author of the blog is Danusha V. Goska, author of "Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype." Access to the blog is free. Goska receives no financial or institutional support from any source.

The blog has also featured guest blog entries. "Ripples of Sin," by Otto Gross, details the roots of his Nazi father's hostility toward Poles, Catholics, and Jews. "Looking Down a Mine Shaft" by Chris Jaworski, is an average Polish-American's reflections on his father. UK crime novelist Danuta Reah's "Making Monsters" talks about the process of ethnic demonization.

Bieganski the Blog has been the springboard for protests against distortions of WW II and Holocaust history, see, for example, the open letter to Clair Willcox regarding the book "They Were Just People," a university press book that claims, inter alia, that the Home Army was an anti-Semitic organization that never did anything to help Jews. Bieganski the Blog was the first to initiate organized protest against the Pier 21 film "Oceans of Hope" that conflates Polish Catholic rescuers of Jews with Nazis. This protest began when Malgorzata Tarchala, a Polish activist living in Germany, contacted Bieganski the Blog.

Unlike all too many such initiatives that protest stereotyping of Poles and other Eastern Europeans, Bieganski the Blog is never chauvinist and it supports its protests with intellectual foundations. For example, in the blog post "Why Stereotype Poles?" Bieganski the Blog explained exactly why books like "They Were Just People" and films like "Oceans of Hope" work to discredit Polish Catholic rescuers of Jews. It has provided the intellectual foundations of the Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype in the series of blog posts entitled, "Inside the Mind of a Bigot." Bieganski the Blog has celebrated Polish-Jewish amity and cooperation in a four-part series of blog posts entitled "Poland's Importance to Jews; Jews' Importance to Poland."

The blog has included literary essays that were eventually published in print media, for example "My Vow: Never Be an Immigrant," and it has reproduced poetry and essays by all-too-little-known Polish-American poets like Christina Pacosz and John Guzlowski, and it has drawn attention to the Polish-Jewish memoirist Edward Herzbaum. The blog has included updates from present-day Poland from Goska, during her 2011 speaking engagements there, and from Poles living in Poland. The blog has published scholarly analyses of brute Polaks in film, novels, and scholarly books. The blog has presented an action plan for Polonia in its response to the brute Polak stereotype in the post "The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision."

Bieganski the Blog has refuted the tendency to lay blame for the stereotypification of Poles on any one ethnic group, including Jews, for example in blog posts entitled "Stop Blaming the Jews."

The blog has proved to be a place on the internet where concerned Polonians can meet, chat, reminisce, and talk strategy. Non-Polonians also read the blog, and have left comments on it attesting to their learning much about Polonia from the blog.

There is no other entity in Polonia doing the work that Bieganski the Blog does. The PAHA Awards committee can make an important contribution to Polonia by acknowledging the importance of the blog's work with the Skainy Civic Achievement Award.

Thank you.

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Blog readers: if you would like to add your name to this request, please do so in the comments section. It would be greatly appreciated. Again, there is no cash award involved here. I would just like to see more Polonians and others engaged in the work outlined above, and one step toward that would be the bestowing of this award on the blog. Thank you.