Make Way For Social Integration: The American Jewish Committee Addresses Postwar Youth in Comics and Film

• In Event: Jewish Youth and Social Change: From Colonial Expansion to Modern Multiculturalism

Abstract

The National Social Welfare Assembly’s Comics Project published socially informed inserts in mainstream comic books in the United States between 1949-1967. With these comic inserts, the Welfare Assembly advocated for greater acceptance of American immigrants, refugees, and cultural minorities. This paper investigates how the American Jewish Committee (AJC)—which helped oversee the project—addressed young people and the cultural category of youth in its promotion of liberal social values and in its condemnation of racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices during the 1940s-1960s. These efforts built on the AJC’s earlier collaboration with leading radio programs and various forms of print media in the 1930s to counter Nazi propaganda and to promote democratic values. I analyze the AJC-created film Make Way For Youth (1947), which starred teenage volunteers from Madison, Wisconsin’s Youth Council; I also examine records from the National Social Welfare Assembly’s Comics Project. Drawing also on a history of changing attitudes toward American youth in the public sphere, I consider relationships between an emergent youth culture, mass media, and social change in relation to these AJC efforts.

Author

• Golan Y. Moskowitz, University of Toronto