Rebuilding the Jewish World after the Holocaust: Philanthropy, Politics, and the Cold War
Professor David Engel from New York University will talk in his lecture about the role of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in rebuilding of the Jewish World after the Holocaust.
- 7 August (Wednesday), 6 PM, free admission
The devastation of the great East European Jewish heartland in the Holocaust, the installation of communist regimes in the region, the Cold War, and the establishment of the State of Israel compelled the leaders of the Jewish world to rethink the fundamental assumptions that had shaped their pre-Holocaust leadership strategies. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee played an active role not only in assisting individual Jews and Jewish communities adjust to the new realities but also in shaping a Jewish strategy for the postwar world. The lecture will analyze the factors that guided the JDC's thinking.
Lecture delivered in English.
David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, and Professor of History at New York University. He has written extensively on various aspects of Jewish political and intellectual history during the first half of the twentieth century, including Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. His books include: Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews 1943-1945 (1993); Between Liberation and Flight: Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership 1944-1946 (Hebrew, 1996); Zionism: A Short History of a Big Idea (2008); Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (2010); and most recently The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard (2016). He also edited Spowiedź Calka Perechodnika, published by Ośrodek KARTA in 2004. Between 1985 and 2016 he edited sixteen volumes of the series Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jews, published by Tel Aviv University. He is currently at work on a study of the problem of security in Jewish history and is preparing a retrospective anthology of his articles on Polish-Jewish relations published over the past thirty-five years
Organizers
The lecture is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.
The lecture was made possible thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
