Our Most Beautiful Children: Communist Contests and Poetry for Immigrant Jewish Youth in Popular Front France

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.

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Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. xv + 309 pp.

10.1093/oso/9780190912628.003.0041 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Indiana University ◽

The Holocaust ◽

The Future ◽

Jewish Youth ◽

Jews In France

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.

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The Many Faces of Leftism

10.1093/oso/9780198737155.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Balázs Trencsényi ◽

Michal Kopeček ◽

Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič ◽

Maria Falina ◽

Mónika Baár ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Great Depression ◽

Common Ground ◽

Socialist Realism ◽

Popular Front ◽

The Political ◽

Right Wing ◽

Right Wing Authoritarianism ◽

Bolshevik Revolution ◽

The Great Depression ◽

The Many

The success of the Bolshevik Revolution confirmed that economic backwardness was not necessarily an obstacle for socialism, as it triggered the radicalization of leftist movements in the region. Yet this also led to polarization of the left on questions of Soviet-Russian developments and possible cooperation with non-socialist parties, as well as agrarian and national questions. While in many countries social democracy entered the political mainstream in the 1920s, its position was undermined by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. In turn, the Great Depression made the communist position more plausible, but the Stalinization of communist parties and the imposition of socialist realism alienated most intellectual supporters. Eventually, some radical leftists turned against the communist movement attacking its dogmatism and the Stalinist show trials. At the same time, the rise of Nazism forced leftist groups to seek a common ground, first in the form of “Popular Front” ideology, and, during the war, in the form of armed partisan movements.

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Lincoln Kirstein’s Social Modernism and the Cultural Front

10.1093/oso/9780199342235.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Andrea Harris

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

World War Ii ◽

Popular Front ◽

World War ◽

Social Relevance ◽

The Arts ◽

Biographical Approach ◽

New Ideas ◽

The Cold War ◽

Political Economic

This chapter takes a biographical approach to Lincoln Kirstein’s creation of a modernist theory of ballet to situate its development in the 1930s cultural wing of the Popular Front and explore its evolution through and after World War II. Fueled by the cultural front’s belief in the role of the arts in social revolution, Kirstein seized the opportunity to decouple ballet from existing biases about its elitism and triviality, and formulate new ideas about its social relevance in the Depression period. After exploring the development of Kirstein’s social modernism in the cultural front, chapter 2 then turns to the challenges posed to the 1930s belief that art could be productively combined with politics through two major turning points in Kirstein’s life. These are his experiences in World War II, and the erosion of his own artistic role in the ballet company after the formation of the New York City Ballet and the ascendance of George Balanchine’s dance-for-dance-sake aesthetic in the late 1940s. The chapter illustrates Kirstein’s attempts to negotiate the social modernist aesthetic he crafted under the wing of the cultural front within the volatile political, economic, and artistic circumstances of World War II, anticommunism, and the Cold War.

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