« All Events
In 1914, seven million Jews across Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean were caught in the crossfire of warring empires in a disaster of stupendous, unprecedented proportions. In response, American Jews developed a new model of humanitarian relief for their suffering brethren abroad, wandering into American foreign policy as they navigated a wartime political landscape. The effort continued into peacetime, touching every interwar Jewish community in these troubled regions through long-term refugee, child welfare, public health, and poverty alleviation projects. Against the backdrop of war, revolution, and reconstruction, this is the history of American Jews who went abroad in solidarity to rescue and rebuild Jewish lives in Jewish homelands. As they constructed a new form of humanitarianism and re-drew the map of modern philanthropy, they rebuilt the Jewish Diaspora itself in the image of the modern social welfare state.
You can buy a copy of Dr Granick’s book, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War here. A 20% discount code will be emailed to everyone who signs up for the talk.
Jaclyn Granick is Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at Cardiff University in Wales, UK, with research expertise at the intersection of Jewish history and international politics. She completed her BA at Harvard and received her MA and PhD in international history from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, supported by a Fulbright fellowship to Switzerland and a graduate fellowship at the Center for Jewish History in New York. She then held a Newton International fellowship and a Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe fellowship for postdoctoral research at Oxford. Dr Granick’s first monograph, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War, was published in June 2021 by Cambridge University Press, and she is editing a journal issue on gender and Jewish international activism forthcoming spring 2022. She is currently co-leading the Jewish Country Houses project and researching politics, philanthropy, gender, and the Holocaust in connection with it (see jch.history.ox.ac.uk)