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

Jaclyn Granick's meticulous and compelling monograph is an important contribution to contemporary Jewish history and to the international history of World War I and the postwar era. Adding substantially to Zosa Szajkowski's earlier studies, Granick, drawing on her extensive archival research, not only places the overseas work led by American Jews in a very large diplomatic, political, social, and economic framework but also elucidates its challenges, accomplishments, and uniqueness.

At the center of Granick's narrative is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Created in November 1914 by a union of Orthodox and Reform American Jews, the JDC by 1931 had expended more than $80 million (equivalent to well over $1 billion in today's currency) on its philanthropic work in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Deftly tracing the organization's wartime origins and activities, its postwar projects, and its ties with Jewish and non-Jewish NGOs and with US, foreign, and international officials, Granick depicts the JDC's American leadership and its US and local field workers along with its recurring deliberations and debates over its goals and priorities.

Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, and charts, the book contains a helpful table of acronyms and abbreviations and is supplemented by an impressive bibliography. Granick's introduction explains the complex national and international environment of the JDC's birth and its unprecedented initiatives "to protect, rebuild, and remake Jewish life abroad" (22). Chapter One details the challenges of dispatching aid to Jewish war sufferers in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean before and after April 1917, which included intensive domestic fundraising, reliance on existing overseas Jewish charitable networks, and close cooperation with US government officials, along with its intelligence and financial collaboration with other groups, including newly arrived Jewish immigrants in the US.

Moving on to the postwar period, Chapter 2 details the JDC's entry into international politics resulting from its ambitious and arduous campaigns to provide food relief in Poland and Ukraine. Chapter Three examines the JDC's reluctant involvement in the burgeoning refugee problem in which Jews were among the major victims, a fraught and costly undertaking complicated by its competition with rival NGOs, America's rejection of the League of Nations, and the US's sweeping immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924 as well as by the swell of antisemitism in Europe and the US. After replacing its foreign missions with thematic divisions, the American-led and funded JDC moved from emergency relief to preserving and uplifting the lives of millions of needy Jews left abroad.

Chapters Four, Five, and Six contain richly detailed accounts of the JDC's involvement in three complex and difficult programs: expanding and sustaining medical facilities in Eastern Europe and Palestine; attempting to uplift the next Jewish generation by aiding orphaned and needy children by building technical-training institutions and creating a job-ready population; and forming the basis of financial support and economic development within targeted Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and Soviet Ukraine.

Granick demonstrates convincingly that in the 1920s the JDC, working through local communities—but also relying on US influence and non-Jewish local and state bureaucrats and NGOs—despite its mounting internal and external critics and rivals and its hesitations and setbacks created a unique model of welfare building and international development. Although the organization's decision-making apparatus and its policy shifts and turns were occasionally impenetrable, Granick largely succeeds in explaining how distant benefactors operated under often crisis situations.

This critical, wide-ranging analysis enables us to think anew about Jewish international humanitarianism during a pivotal decade and to revise our understanding of its reach and effectiveness. Granick's epilogue goes even further: although gravely shaken by the economic and political crises between 1929 and 1945, Jewish international humanitarianism has not only survived but also expanded well into the twenty-first century. And the JDC, defying its critics' charges of an elitist project, a global Jewish conspiracy, and an arm of...