An Ordinary Tale of Solidarity and Survival? Reflections on Jacques Sémelin's The Survival of the Jews in France, 1940–44

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-286
Author(s):  
Aliza Luft
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 00007
Author(s):  
B Dewi Puspitaningrum ◽  
Airin Miranda

<p class="Keyword">Nazi Germany used Endlösung to persecute Jews during the Second World War, leading them to the Holocaust, known as “death”. During the German occupation in France, the status of the Jews was applied. Polonski reacted to the situation by establishing a Zionist resistance, Jewish Army, in January 1942. Their first visions were to create a state of Israel and save the Jews as much as they could. Although the members of the group are not numerous, they represented Israel and played an important role in the rescue of the Jews in France, also in Europe. Using descriptive methods and three aspects of historical research, this article shows that the Jewish Army has played an important role in safeguarding Jewish children, smuggling smugglers, physical education and the safeguarding of Jews in other countries. In order to realize their visions, collaborations with other Jewish resistances and the French army itself were often created. With the feeling of belonging to France, they finally extended their vision to the liberation of France in 1945 by joining the French Forces of the Interior and allied troops.</p>


This chapter reviews the book Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (2015), by Daniella Doron. Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France examines how the French Jews shifted from immediate relief and rehabilitation activities following the Holocaust to longer-term efforts aimed at establishing communal stability and unity. Doron highlights the important role played by Jewish youth in these efforts, arguing that they can serve as a lens through which to study larger concerns such as the future of Jews in France, the reconstruction of families, and ideas about national identity in the reestablished republic. Doron shows that there were competing visions for reconstruction and that hope for the future was often complicated by anxiety and an underlying sense of crisis.


1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Robert F. Byrnes

The principal obstacle to the success of Edouard Drumont's campaign against the Jews in France following the enormous success of La France juive in 1886 was his inability to elaborate a program which could tie effectively “the revolutionary worker and the conservative Christian.” Antisemitism served as a binding force, but Drumont was not so successful in his use of that weapon as Hitler later was in Germany. Most French Socialists by 1891 or 1892 had clearly rejected antisemitism, and by 1892 as well many conservatives had become frightened by the apparent radical aims of the antisemitic campaign. Even those Catholics who were still supporters of Drumont when Captain Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 were followers of Drumont only because no other party or group could attract them.


1998 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 532
Author(s):  
Lee Shai Weissbach ◽  
Pierre Birnbaum ◽  
Jane Marie Todd

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 666-669
Author(s):  
Vicki Caron
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 314-316

“This is not a work of intellectual history in the conventional sense,” writes Maurice Samuels in the introduction to this sophisticated, intricately argued book on French intellectuals’ ruminations about the place of Jews in France since the 18th century. A specialist in French literature at Yale, Samuels presents “a series of close readings of texts” about this issue (p. 15). What are these texts about? Part of a continuing discourse on French citizenship, they are ruminations on whether French society should define rights and obligations for individuals irrespective of their religious, ethnic, or cultural origins, or whether those particularities should govern how individuals identify and order themselves within French society. Suggesting that this Manichean view is too simple, Samuels identifies a countertradition within French universalism that embodies a more malleable approach to universal commitments....


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