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

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.