In 1914, seven million Jews across Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean were caught in the crossfire of warring empires in a disaster of stupendous, unprecedented proportions. In response, American Jews developed a new model of humanitarian relief for their suffering brethren abroad, wandering into American foreign policy as they navigated a wartime political landscape. The effort continued into peacetime, touching every interwar Jewish community in these troubled regions through long-term refugee, child welfare, public health, and poverty alleviation projects. Against the backdrop of war, revolution, and reconstruction, this is the story of American Jews who went abroad in solidarity to rescue and rebuild Jewish lives in Jewish homelands. As they constructed a new form of humanitarianism and re-drew the map of modern philanthropy, they rebuilt the Jewish Diaspora itself in the image of the modern social welfare state.
The history of modern war has focused on destruction; however, practices of saving lives and rebuilding societies have received far less scrutiny. The world wars reconfigured geopolitics on a sacred-secular spectrum dominated by the USA and the USSR. In these events, the motivations of humanitarian actors are disputed as either secular or religious, evoking approval or censure. Although modern global humanitarianism emerged during the world wars, it is often studied in a Euro-centric framework that does not engage the conflicts' globality. The effects of humanitarianism during the Second World War look toward the post-1945 era with not enough reflection on the pre-1945 history of humanitarianism. Thus, what is needed is a critical history beyond moralizing, bringing synchronic and diachronic expansion to study questions of continuity and change. A global history of religious humanitarianism during both world wars places faith-based humanitarianism on a spectrum of belief and unbelief.
This book provides fresh perspectives on a key period in the history of humanitarianism. Drawing on economic, cultural, social and diplomatic perspectives, it explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism in the era of the Great War. Foregrounding the local and global dimensions of the humanitarian responses, it interrogates the entanglement of humanitarian and political interests and uncovers the motivations and agency of aid donors, relief workers and recipients. The chapters probe the limits of humanitarian engagement in a period of unprecedented violence and suffering and evaluate its long-term impact on humanitarian action.
"The reality of diaspora has shaped Jewish history, its demography, its economic relationships, and the politics which that impacted the lives of Jews with each other and with the non-Jews among whom they lived. Jews have moved around the globe since the beginning of their history, maintaining relationships with their former Jewish neighbors, who had chosen other destinations and at the same time forging relationships in their new homes with Jews from widely different places of origin"--
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah. The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
In The Last Treaty, Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919. She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world.
World War II left virtually no nation or corner of the world untouched, dramatically transforming human life and society. It prompted the unprecedented mobilization of whole societies and witnessed a scale of state-sanctioned violence that staggers the imagination, with more than 100 million casualties. The war resulted in an almost complete collapse of any norms geared toward avoiding the unnecessary loss of civilian life and shaped the worldview and psyches of generations. The Oxford Handbook of World War II broadens traditional narratives of the war and in the process changes our understanding of this epic conflict. Organized both chronologically and thematically and with particular attention to the pre- and post-war eras, the Handbook revises and extends existing scholarship. With chapters on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the land war in Western Europe, the Battle of Britain, the impact of war on the major combatants (Great Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and China), the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945, and the cultural responses to the war, the chapters span much of the twentieth century. They suggest areas of scholarly consensus, identify interpretative clashes, and propose agendas for further scholarly investigation, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry. For example, the end of the Cold War had a profound impact on the way World War II was understood. Many formerly closed records in the former Soviet Union and China were opened to scholars, facilitating a more complex view of the Soviet war effort and suggesting that Stalin's army did not simply triumph by overwhelming German forces with sheer numbers but mastered the demands of a vast and logistically demanding front. In conceptualizing the volume, editors Kurt Piehler and Jonathan Grant also sought out contributions on lesser known aspects of the war, such as the Bengal famine in India, the treatment of prisoners of war, the role of Middle Eastern nations, and the activities of non-governmental organizations in ameliorating suffering. Spanning the rise and fall of the Versailles system to the postwar reintegration of veterans and the eventual commemoration of the conflict and its victims, The Oxford Handbook of World War II marks a landmark contribution to the historical literature of war.
Increasingly, war is and will be fought by machines – and virtual networks linking machines - which, to varying degrees, are controlled by humans. This book explores the legal challenges for armed forces resulting from the development and use of new military technologies – automated and autonomous weapon systems, cyber weapons, “non-lethal” weapons and advanced communications - for the conduct of warfare. The contributions, each written by scholars and military officers with expertise in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), provide analysis and recommendations for armed forces as to how these new technologies may be used in accordance with international law. Moreover, the chapters provide suggestions for military doctrine to ensure continued compliance with IHL during this ever-more-rapid evolution of technology.
Though the Holocaust has been documented in depth, historians and the public know very little about the experience of Eastern European Jews during the preceding world war. A Nation of Refugees tells the story of how ordinary Jewish people in the Russian Empire survived World War I as refugees and civilians. It focuses on the resilience and organized campaigns of humanitarian war relief that countered violence and victimization. Above all, it captures the voices and experiences of refugees at a time of upheaval and war through first-hand accounts.