Post Holocaust France And The Jews 1945 1955

Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant post‑war Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II. How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The volume examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of postwar French Judaism.Comprehensive and informed, this volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology. With contributions from leading scholars, including Edward Kaplan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Jay Winter, the book establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organisations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust. Comprehensive and informed, this volume will be invaluable to readers working in Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant post‑war Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II. How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The volume examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of postwar French Judaism.Comprehensive and informed, this volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology. With contributions from leading scholars, including Edward Kaplan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Jay Winter, the book establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organisations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust. Comprehensive and informed, this volume will be invaluable to readers working in Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

Paris was home to one of the key European initiatives to document and commemorate the Holocaust, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine . By analysing the earliest Holocaust narratives and their reception in France, this study provides a new understanding of the institutional development of Holocaust remembrance in France after the War.

Examines the change in memory regime in postwar France, from one centered on the concentration camps to one centered on the Holocaust.

ø Many recent books have documented the collaboration of the French authorities with the anti-Jewish German policies of World War II. Yet about 76 percent of France?s Jews survived?more than in almost any other country in Western Europe. How do we explain this phenomenon? Certainly not by looking at official French policy, for the Vichy government began preparing racial laws even before the German occupiers had decreed such laws. To provide a full answer to the question of how so many French Jews survived, Susan Zuccotti examines the response of the French people to the Holocaust. Drawing on memoirs, government documents, and personal interviews with survivors, she tells the stories of ordinary and extraordinary French men and women. Zuccotti argues that the French reaction to the Holocaust was not as reprehensible as it has been portrayed.

Now in English, the authoritative work on ordinary Jews in France during World War II.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.