International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War by Jaclyn Granick Sara Halpern Jaclyn Granick. International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 418 pp. My step-grandfather, who directed the JDC’s (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) Jerusalem office, once told me: “The JDC went to help the Jews in Europe during World War I and then it was going to get out of business. Then there were crises in the 1920s, so the JDC stayed to solve those and then it’d get out of business. That didn’t happen. It’s been a hundred years and it’s still in business!” His words echo Jaclyn Granick’s meticulous research in her International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War. This book chronicles how American Jewish organizations, the JDC especially, expanded and transformed their philanthropic work overseas between 1914 and 1929. In contrast to non-sectarian American counterparts such as the American Relief Association (ARA) and American Red Cross, American Jewish organizations’ ethnic and religious ties to Jewish beneficiaries in east central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Palestine complicated their departure after 1921. They lingered via philanthropy, credit lending, loans, and advising in social and medical welfare. Granick argues that their leaders regarded American Progressive values and practices as superior to Western European ideas of solving the “Jewish question” in those regions. This proposition also worked as both complementary and antithetical to Zionism, which Granick tenaciously illustrates. Conversely, Jewish participation in social and economic welfare widens the interpretation of “humanitarianism” beyond Christian and nonsectarian frameworks in the United States and Western Europe. The book’s chapter structures betray seemingly infinite moving parts in the planning and execution of humanitarian work as American Jews sought to import social scientific expertise and formalize relationships with surviving Jewish communities and organizations. The targeted population numbered seven million, making their “scale, ambition, modern sophistication, and institutional insurance” [End Page 476] (26) unprecedented in the history of Jewish institutions. With rich evidence from twenty archives and five languages in four countries and an impressive synthesis of national studies, Granick argues that American Jewish humanitarian concerns for Jews in Europe and Palestine as an institution occurred “a full generation earlier” than acknowledged (20). American Jews engaged with the State Department and multiple Jewish and international financial networks to assist Jewish victims of the Great War for the first time. The introduction of Progressivism and rehabilitation as a path to self-sufficiency marked a clear departure from the European path in the historiography of Jewish solidarity and participation in imperialism. Yet it did not mean that American Jewish humanitarians happily sojourned to feed the hungry and become saviors. Rather, they confronted, as one JDC worker described, “a calamity of stupendous proportions” (2). Against the backdrop of continued public resistance to the United States’s global engagement, American Jewish organizations began negotiating with the State Department in the realms of foreign policy and empire-building to be able to carry out their mission. To be clear, Granick investigates how American Jewish organizations, especially the JDC, employed soft power in communities abroad by exporting Progressivist values and culture in the provision of food, vocational training, and medical care. By adapting American models to local communities’ culture and needs and promoting Jewish solidarity, they hoped that this approach to modernity would stabilize Jewish futures in vulnerable parts of the Diaspora. The book explores the years of the American “project of collectivist Jewish welfarism” (19). In chapter 1, Granick delves into the JDC’s bureaucratic structures that enabled it to appear “state-like” and draw criticisms of micromanagement from beneficiaries (21). This discussion maps how uptown Jewish bankers cultivated relationships inside the State Department to cross enemy lines and utilized European Jewish financial networks for distribution of funds and supplies. In chapter 2, the focus shifts to (borrowing Peter Gatrell’s words) the consequences of how “the Great War rendered Jews as a whole diaspora walking” as empires collapsed (6). The JDC and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) reengineered their road maps for emergency relief to align with nonsectarian American organizations and the American Friends...