A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson Faure (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson Faure Jaclyn Granick Laura Hobson Faure. A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. xix + 345 pp. Laura Hobson Faure’s monograph, adapted, updated, and translated from her French-language edition, has already made a splash in the Anglophone Jewish world, winning the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. The monograph is indeed a superb example of historical scholarship and writing, which shine in its English edition. A Jewish Marshall Plan focuses on the post-Holocaust Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in France as a way of dually exploring the entangled nature of American and French history and its Jewish counterparts. When the French edition was published in 2013, the JDC as a subject of historical inquiry was still rare. Hobson Faure’s work has been crucial in the last decade in shifting historiography on overseas American Jewish philanthropy from hagiographical institutional history into many emerging transnational history frameworks, including: America in the world, international humanitarianism and Jewish philanthropy, postwar American influence on France, and Jewish Diaspora after the Holocaust. A combination of thorough archival research in addition to original oral histories, deployed with a particular sensitivity to gender dynamics, provides a stunning array of viewpoints grounding the entire narrative. A Jewish Marshall Plan opens via an introduction to French Jewish resistance member turned humanitarian social worker, Gaby Wolff Cohen, whom we meet again throughout the book. Wolff Cohen’s story reminds readers of the American organizations and professions related to social work, teaching, and nursing that were so fundamental to this project and to nurturing women’s emerging communal leadership. Hobson Faure points out, though, soberingly, that despite the similarities in the effort by Americans to influence French society, while the Marshall Plan responded to the Cold War, the American Jewish initiative was rather a response to the Holocaust, undertaken to fill a void where Jewish survivors were a political afterthought. This resulted in a parallel welfare system, both by choice and by need: other humanitarian associations like the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration sought to rebuild nation-states and promote internationalism, while the JDC aimed to re-enroot Jews in the nation-state. Setting the scene, chapter 1 explains that French Jews understood themselves as equal partners to American Jewish organizations, due to their identification with the legacy of the Alliance Israélite Universelle—despite their Holocaust ruination. In 1933, the JDC began to shift its attention from eastern toward western Europe in response to new refugee crises, relocating its European hub back to Paris (where it had begun in 1919) and attempting to influence French refugee policy to absorb incomers. Navigating the war years together blurred the lines between American and French Jewish aid as French Jews took charge of American funds and communications were severed. The next two chapters turn to the immediate postwar period. As France was liberated, American Jewish chaplains and GIs drew liberally on their military responsibilities, providing crucial, ad hoc, and highly personalized assistance to [End Page 472] survivors. These young men breathed new life into French Judaism; while most French opposed the American occupation, Jewish soldiers were received in hospitality and friendship by French Jews, who invited them into their homes and lives. French Jewish leadership then found itself sidelined as Americans took back the reins of the French JDC and bypassed the new centralized organization designed to represent and defend the political interests of all varieties of French Jews (CRIF). American Jewish aid stepped into the central role in postwar French Jewish life, paradoxically attempting to aid all needy Jews while also trying to encourage the French government to do its part. Infused with American money, French Jewish welfare agencies expanded in all directions, which the JDC then worked to harmonize and optimize for efficiency. Chapters 4 through 6 discuss longer-term reconstruction, its enmeshment in international politics, and the influence of social work. A rich network of diverse Jewish organizations with a difficult coexistence came to characterize postwar French Jewish life. In 1947, the JDC in France, headed by...