Health, Gender, and the Jewish Nation in International Humanitarian Practice after the First World War

• In Event: Gender and Jewish Inter/Nationalism across the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This paper compares and connects three newly established Jewish international philanthropic organizations active in the Interwar Period, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Hadassah the American Women’s Zionist Organization, and the Women’s International Zionist Organization, with regard to gender and practice. All three interlinked organizations undertook work that might be seen as “humanitarian,” from Jews in Western countries targeted for Jews in East Central Europe, Soviet Russia, and/or the Middle East. All were responding to the crisis of the Great War and associated political achievements, like the Balfour Declaration and the Minorities Treaties. And all had women in key positions.

Using the extensive archives of these three organizations to holistically examine their humanitarian practices and goals, I will map out the gendered patterns and the resulting division of labor, geographical orientation, and motivations within these institutions. Furthermore, I will contextualize the gendering of international Jewish health and child relief within the broader programs of Jewish humanitarian relief in the Interwar Period, the Jewish women’s movement, and Jewish internationalism in the twentieth century. Such a context will make it clear that health, gender, and nation were closely connected concepts in international Jewish humanitarianism after the Great War, and allow me to rethink the connections between Jewish internationalism and Jewish nationalism through a gender lens.

The national ingredient in this matrix is essential for understanding Jewish women’s role in international Jewish politics and, perhaps, for the seeming gravitation of Western Jewish women to Zionist social projects or their supposed disappearance from Jewish history as they departed for other political realms. In short, Jewish liberal internationalists, humanitarian or otherwise, were always men. Jewish women were able to act as humanitarians only in a national and health-based context, projecting national maternalist politics across geopolitical borders, but blocked in other areas, even when possessing relevant expertise. Alternatively, Jewish women could leave the Jewish political sphere to become liberal internationalists elsewhere, largely through the international feminist and pacifist movement, though the degree differed as to how much they set their Jewishness aside.

Author

• Jaclyn B. Granick, University of Oxford