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...