While the role the United States played in France’s liberation from Nazi Germany is widely celebrated, it is less well known that American Jewish individuals and organizations mobilized to reconstruct Jewish life in France after the Holocaust. In A “Jewish Marshall Plan,” Laura Hobson Faure explores how American Jews committed themselves and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring much needed aid to their French coreligionists.
Hobson Faure sheds light on American Jewish chaplains, members of the Armed Forces, and those involved with Jewish philanthropic organizations who sought out Jewish survivors and became deeply entangled with the communities they helped to rebuild. While well intentioned, their actions did not always meet the needs and desires of the French Jews.
A “Jewish Marshall Plan” examines the complex interactions, exchanges, and solidarities created between American and French Jews following the Holocaust. Challenging the assumption that French Jews were passive recipients of aid, this work reveals their work as active partners who negotiated their own role in the reconstruction process.
Nonfiction
A “Jewish Marshall Plan” The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France
January 3, 2022
Discussion Questions
In A Jewish Marshall Plan: the American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France, Laura Hobson Faure analyzes the postwar encounter between American Jews and the French Jewish community in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Utilizing sources from sixteen archives in France, Israel, and the United States, Hobson Faure crafts a meticulously detailed transnational social history of the interaction between American Jews associated primarily with the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) and the US Army that highlights the vast sums of philanthropic assistance that characterized the Jewish Marshall Plan, based in deeply held feelings of transnational solidarity, which were nonetheless tangled in complex social and political dynamics. Hobson Faure’s painstaking approach to archival research leaves almost no page unturned, incorporating documentation, oral history, press accounts, memoirs, and more to craft an innovative, indeed path-breaking, history of the postwar reconstruction of the Jewish community in France and the leading role played by the JDC, in a work that will surely become the new standard in the field.
Jewish literature inspires, enriches, and educates the community.
Help support the Jewish Book Council.
