hosted by Poland and Ukraine. We met one morning at the museum’s temporary offices downtown. “I serve three masters,” Cudak told me, in his limited English, referring to the Ministry of Culture, the city of Warsaw, and the American-backed Association. His desk was decorated with a small silver soccer ball trophy, a memento of his previous success.

A few days later, Cudak waved to me cheerfully from behind a bank of microphones set out in the lobby of the museum building, where the government was holding a hard-hat tour for the Warsaw press corps. He stood alongside Warsaw’s Mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, an economist who served as head of Poland’s national bank in the 1990s. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett flitted around the edges of the crowd photographing the almost-finished interior of the museumthe history of Jews in America, and I think here they will learn the history of Jews in Poland.”

***

Whether the Poles will succeed in selling a new narrative to Jewish visitors from abroad still remains to be seen. While I was in Warsaw, I spent an afternoon with an adult tour group organized by the Ramah Israel Institute, the Jerusalem-based offshoot of the American Conservative movement’s camping arm. Their itinerary included stops at the major camps—Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek—as well as formerly Jewish shtetls in Galicia, the ghetto of Krakow and the factory where Oskar Schindler saved the Jews on his list. Their first stop was the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, where their guide, Moshe Gold, started by holding up a plastic sleeve containing a sheet of paper