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Our Most Beautiful Children: Communist Contests and Poetry for Immigrant Jewish Youth in Popular Front France
- Jewish Social Studies
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 23, Number 1, Fall 2017
- pp. 64-100
- 10.2979/jewisocistud.23.1.03
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Between 1936 and 1938, Jewish Communists in Paris began a formal campaign to encourage children to participate in their Yiddish community-building project, as a means of engaging whole families, especially women. The use of both Yiddish and French in the Communist Yiddish-language daily newspaper Naye prese and the work of children’s poet Dovid Pliskin shows how Jewish Communists in Paris, surprisingly, tried to expose a wide range of Yiddish speakers in Paris to what might be seen as a particular and distinctive sort of diaspora nationalism. Additionally, the study of Jewish children in interwar Paris sheds new light on intersections and overlap between Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews and the French left.