Jewish Humanitarianism and East Central Europe in the Age of the Great War

The Great War transformed the map of East Central Europe from a handful of abutting empires to a string of new independent nation states. That region also was the heartland of Ashkenazi Jewry, which was likewise reconfigured into countless new political, economic, and social relationships. European Jews were on the brink of disaster, thrown into upheaval and violence by the war and its fallout, including the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the Polish-Soviet War, as well as correlated anti-Jewish violence claiming victims into the hundreds of thousands. A new wartime relief organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, responded to displaced, starving, terrified, and grieving Polish and Ukrainian Jews and other exigencies of the moment. The ‘Joint’ rebuilt and reconfigured local and regional philanthropies and intervened with authorities and other international humanitarian actors to ease these transitions and define a future for European Jews. This is the story of the emergence of modern humanitarianism, drawing on the Jewish diaspora and sustaining it, with remarkable creativity and perseverance in the face of crisis.

About the speaker:

Jaclyn Granick is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at Cardiff University. Her monograph International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge 2021) won the National Jewish Book Award for writing based on archival material. She is currently co-investigating the AHRC-funded Jewish Country Houses project and writing a book on Jewish women’s international activism, launched through the journal issue Gendering Jewish Inter/Nationalism.

The event is co-organised by UCL SSEES Rethinking Eastern Europe and Eurasia Seminar, UCL Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies.