American Jewish History

Laura Hobson-Faure activates French Jewish voices in A "Jewish Mar-shall Plan": The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France to study American and French Jewish visions of French Jewry after the Holocaust and their results. The chapters show how the two sides tackled the aftereffects of occupation absent French state support in loose chronological order: liberation, material relief, reconstruction of surviving charities, resurgence of political organizations, and professionalization of social work in France.

Through the "bottom up" approach and oral histories and archival materials in France, Israel, and the United States, Hobson-Faure contends that France serves as an ideal case study for analyzing American Jews' reconstruction efforts in Jewish Europe. She argues that French Jewry was far from a passive actor in the rehabilitation of their community. They negotiated with American Jewish leaders, understanding that their differences were grounded in culture, values, and war experiences. Both could agree that France offered hope, with high survival rates and the influx of thousands of Eastern European Jews seeking to resettle or embark for new destinations. Thus France could justify taking a big slice of the budget of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Moreover, American and French (and other European) Jews grappled with the shift of financial, political, and social gravity from Europe to the United States. In their discussions with American Jews, French Jews attempted to have their needs and desires met on their own terms. However, as Hobson-Faure consistently shows, they often recognized that conceding to dollars and organizational infrastructures and methods was necessary to achieve self-sufficiency.

Given American Jews' humanitarian and political participation at a time of the United States's increased influence in global affairs, Hobson-Faure seeks to situate A Jewish Marshall Plan within the historiographies of US interventionism and empire-building. Through an analysis of the "circulation of knowledge and cultural transfers," she presents a more complex narrative than merely one of American cultural imperialism (13). In contrast to the real Marshall Plan, which was designed to counter [End Page 497] Soviet influence in Europe, Hobson-Faure contends that this Jewish version aimed to deepen transatlantic Jewish solidarity in the name of rebuilding Jewish Europe after the Holocaust. This vantage point throws relief on a massive literature treating Germany as a temporary site and Israel as a permanent solution for post-Holocaust Jewish life in that part of the world. It highlights the necessity of viewing Europe as still viable despite of the catastrophe.

That particular effort did not necessarily nurture the unity that American Jewish organizations in New York imagined. Their representatives in France and French Jews expressed anxieties about American cultural imperialism via philanthropy. Theoretically, Hobson-Faure suggests, Jewish philanthropy operated as a means to maintain Jewish survival, group solidarity, and identity. The democratization of American Jewish philanthropy from the 1920s meant that French Jews would encounter American Jewish diversity from GIs to social workers to educators to political elites. The vast majority of donors never visited France but Hobson-Faure stresses the importance of examining the actual outcomes of their financial contributions. She traces how Americans leveraged wealth—of knowledge and resources—to gain influence over French Jewish organizational structures and practices, which they perceived as outdated. She cautions that any study of philanthropy and knowledge cannot be one-sided. Despite their financial need, French Jews actively sought to maintain the public image that their status quo was equal to that of American Jews. After all, their surviving organizations, especially the Alliance Israélite Universelle, had significant political, cultural, and financial power to help Jews inside and outside of France.

Hobson-Faure successfully charts how French Jews struggled to accept American wealth to make their organizations more resilient (and, to some, modern) in the wake of the Holocaust. Adapting the UJA philanthropic model to French Jews' sociocultural norms represented one important strategy. UJA reflected the latest model of domestic philanthropic structure with multiple links to overseas fundraising campaigns. Hobson-Faure painstakingly details tireless negotiations to unify a disparate array of French Jewish organizations to support such an endeavor in France. Finally, the FSJU (Unified Jewish Social Fund) was ratified in 1949, despite the last minute withdrawal of French Jewish communists and the later complications of show trials in Prague and Moscow accusing the JDC of funding communist organizations.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of A Jewish Marshall Plan is the final chapter on the JDC's Paul Baerwald School (PBS). PBS has been spotlighted in the historiography of French social work because of its casework method, an American import, but never interrogated. Prior practice had emphasized unconditional distribution of aid. In contrast, [End Page 498] casework encouraged active effort toward self-sufficiency on the beneficiaries' part. This approach excited non-Jews across Europe, not only France. In addition, PBS drew Jewish students from across Europe, North Africa, and Israel. Aside from identifying themselves as Jews, students had to have a working knowledge of French, for this language was the medium of instruction. This point served as a strategy for minimizing visible signs of American cultural imperialism, which the JDC representatives in France, including the director of JDC France, Laura Margolis, had become acutely aware of by 1948. For Hobson Faure, "PBS represented a rare experiment in the postwar Jewish experience because it created a space where Jews from both sides of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean could exchange ideas, debate, and learn together" (210). Although PBS graduated a new generation of Jewish female social workers, its temporary status resulted in never seeking accreditation from the French state to make their graduates employable outside of Jewish communities. In 1956 it became part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, helping to ease the overwhelming demand for social workers in Israel.

This is an important book that contributes to the transnational histories of Jews in France and the United States, histories of postwar reconstruction of and social work in Europe and studies of the histoire croisee method and modern philanthropy.