6 - The Impoverished

Summary

The culmination of an ambitious and unique campaign to make humanitarianism self-sufficient, comprehensive reconstruction work became the focus of and heir to all previous international Jewish social welfare work. This chapter considers this humanitarian response to Jewish impoverishment as a result of war. Superimposing American wealth and Progressivism onto long-standing Jewish self-help ideology, prewar vocational training, housing construction, and agricultural colonization were revived and expanded, especially in the Soviet Union. Crucially, this involved the creation of two American-Western European foundations to foster Jewish microlending and cooperative systems in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Jewish reconstruction sat somewhere between state social welfare and international development. The crash of 1929 made economic relief the primary form of Jewish relief and serves as an endpoint to the narrative.