Konstanty Gebert, journalist and activist

Konstanty Gebert is an international reporter and columnist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's biggest daily. He was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, when he was also an organizer of the Jewish Flying University, and an underground journalist in the 1980s under martial law. He is the founder of the Polish Jewish intellectual monthly Midrasz, and a board member of the Taube Centre for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland and of Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. He has taught in Poland, Israel, and the US, and has written books on topics including the Polish democratic transformation, French policy toward Poland, the Yugoslav wars, the wars of Israel, Torah commentary, and post-war Polish Jewry. His essays have appeared in two dozen collective works in Poland and abroad, and his articles in newspapers around the world. Gebert visited the University of Michigan in 1999 as a participant in the conference, "Communism's Negotiated Collapse: The Polish Round Table of 1989, Ten Years Later."