About the talk:

Janusz Makuch spoke at TEDxKrakow, which took place on 25 October 2013 at Stara Zajezdnia in Kraków's Jewish district. Our theme this year was Make! and was a celebration of making. We asked our speakers to explore and demonstrate the practice, and to ponder what it takes to make more makers. We featured some of Krakow's makers and created a dedicated maker space to encourage our audience of over 600 people to have a go at making something -- anything!

Recorded during: TEDxKraków 2013

About the speaker:

Janusz is best known as a founder of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and has been its director for 25 years. Amongst many honors, he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta “for outstanding achievements in discovering, collecting and disseminating the truth about the Holocaust, and for his contribution to advancing the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”.

The Jewish Culture Festival has led to the rebirth of Jewish life in Kazimierz, and is one of the biggest and most important festivals of its kind in the world. It features Jewish folk music and traditional Klezmer, synagogue and Hasidic music, as well as modern fusion experiments such as Hebrew jazz, rap, gospel and afro-beat, as well as film screenings, debates, workshops, multimedia and art exhibitions and performances by and centered around the Jewish community in Poland and abroad. Most significantly, it draws a largely non-Jewish, Polish audience that is able to witness the rebirth of Jewish culture in Krakow.

During his TEDxKraków Talk, Janusz will tell the story of the transformation that took place in a young Pole who discovered his Atlantis – the Jewish world – many years ago. This story entails entering a world of cultural pluralism, in which the most important trait is mutual respect for all differences, and in which it’s sometimes necessary to be a heretic marching against the tide of history, because there is no progress without heresy. In short, his own story.