"The Last Act in the Tragedy of Judaism": Stalinist Antisemitism, the American Jewish Committee, and French Holocaust Memory in the Cold War

Abstract:

Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through direct historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide of European Jewry. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals—Jewish and non-Jewish—elided the genocide's Western European dimensions. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal Évidences comparatively alongside its American sister journal, Commentary, and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply impede Holocaust memory in the West; rather, anti-totalitarian projects produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.