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

March 31, 2023 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM
 | 
In-person
Europe & Eurasia, Human rights & justice

This event is over

This in-person event takes place in Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place.
The talk focused 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 used 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 demonstrated 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.
Sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies
Europe & Eurasia, Human rights & justice
Larysa Iarovenko; larysa.iarovenko@utoronto.ca

Speakers

Emma Kuby
Emma Kuby

Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University

William Nelson

Professor in the History department at University of Toronto at Scarborough