"In unserem Kreise": Czech-Jewish Activism and Diaspora in the USA, 1933–1994

Well over ten thousand Jews from Czechoslovakia immigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1950, first fleeing Nazism, then Stalinism. A minority within this minority, predominantly from Bohemia and Moravia and numbering no more than a few hundred, distinguished themselves by founding and joining a series of Czechoslovak-Jewish organizations. These individuals wrestled with nostalgia until the century’s end, fighting to implant and preserve their lost culture in a new American home. They clung to each other, to identities rooted in a shattered world, and to a fading tradition of bourgeois, Jewish, associational life. The following investigation into their activities and motivations (distinct from others in their immigrant cohort), offers a window into processes of homemaking and memory construction that echoed through the lives of a broader community of mid-century Jewish immigrants to the United States. With the war’s end, these Czech-Jewish activists (as I will refer to them) adapted the European-Jewish political strategies that they had imported to the United States to cultural practices for constructing a diasporic community rooted in a nostalgic attachment to the interwar Czechoslovakia of their memories. The first years of Czech-Jewish activism in the US, therefore, also offered a final glimpse of European-Jewish diaspora-nationalism, displaced across an ocean by genocide. Diaspora nationalists held that Jews around the world composed a single nation, and that this entitled them to enjoy rights to political and cultural self-determination as a national minority wherever they resided—alongside other national minorities. In Czechoslovakia, this ideology was meant to have offered Jews, as a collectivity, an opportunity to profess loyalty to their state as citizens and to find there unambiguous welcome as the Jews of Czechoslovakia.2 During the