Moroccan Jews, American Jews, and French Decolonization in North Africa, 1945-1955

media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.

You can view available recordings of past Africa at Noon speakers here and on the event page as well.

The event is free and open to the public.

This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)

Talk Description

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some American Jewish organizations turned their attention to French colonial North Africa as “one of the great reservoirs of Jewish life” that remained on the globe. Indeed, the nearly half million Jews who lived under French rule in Algeria, Tunisia, and especially Morocco in 1945 outnumbered the remaining Jewish population of France itself – or that of any individual Western European country. Over time, therefore, groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee began to shift some resources away from providing emergency assistance to Holocaust survivors in Europe and toward efforts to support Jews in French North Africa. In the case of Morocco, this produced intensive programs of humanitarian aid to address urban Jewry’s “crushing poverty” and high rates of childhood disease and malnutrition; as Moroccan independence loomed, it also came to involve a political defense of continued French colonial control of North Africa in name of protecting Jews. This talk considers what these multifaceted efforts looked like and highlights the active and ambivalent ways in which Morocco’s diverse Jewish community ultimately received them.

Speaker’s Bio

Emma Kuby is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern Europe, she specializes in France and its empire. Her research focuses on the legacies of World War II’s violence during the era of decolonization. Her first book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell, 2019), examined an activist campaign by French and other European Nazi camp survivors to expose ongoing crimes against humanity in the postwar world, from the USSR to French Algeria. Political Survivors received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Council for European Studies Book Award.

Dr. Kuby’s talk is drawn from her ongoing second book project, which reconstructs the ephemeral community of Jewish American expatriates who lived in France and French North Africa after 1945, demonstrating how they used France’s recovery from Nazi occupation and struggles with decolonization to reengage with European culture and reimagine their own European roots.