[1] Polonsky has played a leading role in setting up the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford, and served for six years on the Board of Deputies of British Jews, including membership of the Yad Vashem Memorial Committee.

Polonsky also spent time at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London, and is an Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

[14] In 2011, Polonsky was awarded the Kulczycki Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for Volumes I and II of The Jews in Poland and Russia.

[16] In private towns, owned by Polish nobility and distanced from royal authority, the Jewish community assisted the landowner in turning their estates into profitable concerns.

Snyder argues that the "Judeo-Bolshevik" idea, "brought west by Russians and Baltic Germans after the Bolshevik victory in Russia's civil wars, became an integral part of Hitler's vision."

Nonetheless, Snyder calls Polonsky's three volume work "a grand history in the old 19th-century style, a result all the more remarkable because he cannot have the confidence in progress that historians of that age possessed.

Polonsky has written that one of the biggest issues confronting historians of the Holocaust is that all of the countries of Eastern Europe were subjected to two occupations— the German Nazi and the Soviet Russian occupation.

"[20]In Volume Three of The Jews in Poland and Russia, Polonsky critiques the typology which Raul Hilberg established in his analysis of the Holocaust, dividing those involved into perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.

[21] Polonsky writes that the term 'bystander' is problematic, because "the implication that the bystanders had free choice, as in the parable of the good Samaritan, either to assist the Jews or go on their way fails to take into account the nature of Nazi rule.

"[22] Polonsky writes that criticism of people living under German occupation in Eastern Europe is often overtly moralistic, and accompanied by unsubstantiated speculation about what these so-called 'bystanders' might have done.