2018 amendment of the act on the Polish Institute of National Remembrance that was passed by the Polish Sejm in January 2018 raised a vibrant public debate about Polish-Jewish relations. In this article, we try to trace the dynamics of this debate and assess its consequences for contemporary Polish-Jewish relations and present-day representations of the relations between Poles and Jews during the German occupation in 1939–1945. To this end, we present the analysis of social media content, data from search engines, as well as the results of two nationwide polls conducted at the beginning of 2018. These studies indicate that the debate on amendment of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance has increased the expression of antisemitic prejudice in the media and on the internet, increased the presence of defective codes of memory, and at the same time polarized the Polish debate about the behavior of Poles during the Holocaust. The results of these analyzes are discussed in the context of earlier debates on the Polish-Jewish relations during Nazi occupation, referring to the category of “secondary antisemitism” that receives growing support in current social sciences.

In February 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, continuing a war that lasted since 2014. This turn of events led to massive migration of Ukrainian refugees to Poland, during which the country received approx. 2 million new inhabitants. The rapid migrational process led to attitudinal changes in the host country's population. This article reviews survey studies conducted at the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw (cross-sectional and longitudinal) assessing the attitudes of Poles toward Ukrainians. According to our data, the attitudes of Poles toward Ukraine improved after the 2022 Russian invasion (compared to 2021), and our longitudinal studies confirmed that this change was relatively long-lasting – the attitudes did not deteriorate substantially. A study looking at attitudes toward war refugees from Ukraine and refugees from other countries found that Poles showed significantly higher acceptance of Ukrainian refugees than those from other countries, which could be largely attributed to greater contact with Ukrainians. Furthermore, Poles expressed relatively high acceptance of state support for healthcare and education of Ukrainian refugees, whereas the acceptance of direct financial support and housing was relatively lower.