Jewish Subcultures and the Left in Postwar France

• In Event: Rethinking Jewish “Subcultures”: Algerian, Parisian, Viennese, and Beyond

Abstract

Postwar, post-Holocaust Europe's largest Jewish population was found in France, and it was diverse, covering several years and layers of migration and integration into France. France's postwar social, political, cultural, and linguistic context was also unique in Europe because it played host to so many different Jewish migrant, returnee, and survivor communities. This complex mix of French Jewish communities can then lead to the evaluation of Jewish integration into French societies though an analysis, influenced by David Sorkin's pioneering work, of the variety of Jewish "subcultures" that were present. To complement Sorkin's case study of Jews in early modern Germany, the postwar French case establishes new hierarchies of cultural inclusion, demonstrating the need to both use and reform how we understand the operation of Jewish subculture and subcultures as a means through which Jews sought to transform themselves as members of their larger host societies in post-emancipation Europe. This was especially salient in the wake of the Holocaust, a period in European history when Jewish emancipation had been revoked and then re-instituted.

Through an examination of the revitalization of Yiddish culture in post-Vichy, post-Holocaust, and postwar France, this paper will demonstrate new markers of inclusion that Yiddish-speaking Jews appealed to create a new, Franco-Yiddish postwar Jewish subculture. This particular Jewish community in France sought not to include themselves as part of a normative French bourgeois culture, but as part of an alternative French leftist Republicanism that seemingly embraced cultural pluralism and advocated for the benefits of a cosmopolitan French cultural sphere. To analyze how these Yiddish-speaking Jews articulated their Franco-Yiddish subculture, this paper will examine simultaneously the postwar Yiddish cultural organization the Farband fun YIdISHE KULTUR-GEZELSHAFTN IN FRANKRAYKH, the Yiddish theatre group YKUT, and the Yiddish literary journal PARIZER SHRIFTN (Paris writings) to understand the French cultural cues and societal norms to which these people tried to attach their program of Yiddish cultural renewal in the wake of the Holocaust.

Author

• Nicholas Underwood, German Historical Institute