Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France

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Nick Underwood explores how left-wing Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s in his new publication, Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France.

In this first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris depended on "culture makers," mostly Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO, theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937.

Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

Join YIVO for a discussion of this publication with Underwood in conversation with Professor Laura Hobson Faure.

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About the Speakers

Nick Underwood is an assistant professor of history and the Berger-Neilsen Chair of Judaic Studies at The College of Idaho. He earned his PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder and, prior to his current appointment, held postdocs at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.

Laura Hobson Faure is a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University-Paris 1, where she holds the chair of Modern Jewish history and is a member of the Center for Social History (UMR 8058). She is the author of A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: the American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France (in French, Armand Colin, 2013; Indiana University Press, 2022) and Rescue: The Story of Kindertransport to France and America (forthcoming, Yale University Press). She also co-edited L’Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants et les populations juives au XXème siècle. Prévenir et Guérir dans un siècle de violences (Armand Colin, 2014) and Enfants « sans famille » dans les conflits du XXème siècle, (forthcoming, éditions CNRS).