‘The Outsider Turned Ambassador’: American Jews, Holocaust Memory, and Tensions of Empire in Postwar France, 1945-55

Description

The talk focuses on one particular set of actors within Dr. Kuby’s broader research on American Jewish activism in post-1945 France: the Paris Office staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

Kuby uses the case of the AJC to illuminate how France became the key setting for the American Jewish confrontation with post-Holocaust Europe. By considering how the organization’s leaders intervened in French conversations about both the recent Jewish genocide and the fate of North African Jewish populations, she demonstrates their eagerness to displace antisemitism  onto non-Western "others," elide the French state’s own participation in the Holocaust, and cast France, despite its now-diminished geopolitical role, as the epicenter of a cosmopolitan, tolerant West.

About the speakers:

Emma Kuby is an associate professor of History at Northern Illinois University. An intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern Europe, she specializes in postwar France and its empire. Her book Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association and the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.

William Nelson is a professor in the History department at University of Toronto at Scarborough. Nelson specializes in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. His research focuses on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world.