Focusing on Jews in the Garden, a memoir that the New York Times said “reads like a thriller,” we will discuss the challenges the author experienced over a decades-long search and many trips to Poland for the truth about how some relatives died in hiding in Poland during World War II. The quest’s successes - from interviews with upstanding locals to revelations from long-secret court documents - have faced more recent threats from whitewashing efforts to replace truth with a narrative that prioritizes national pride and benefits from disappearing eyewitnesses. We will discuss fresh efforts to politicize history near and far and possible solutions. 

Judy Rakowsky is the author of the critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Jews in the Garden that the New York Times said, “reads like a thriller” and which was an editor’s choice of the New York Times book review. She spent decades on deadline as an award-winning investigative reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, People Magazine, the Providence Journal, and other outlets. As a young reporter she got to know Cousin Sam, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto and Nazi concentration camps who later raised a family in Ohio. She traveled again and again to Poland with Sam in pursuit of a cousin who survived the massacre of her family in hiding with brave Poles. Describing those discoveries—the true history of what happened to these relatives—was outlawed in 2018 by the Polish government. Coverage of Jews in the Garden can be found in The New York Times, NPR’s Book of the Day, USA Today, Boston Globe Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Providence Journal, and other outlets. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Sam.