This introduction opens with a story about a Jewish relief worker writing home. The reader is then introduced to the vast suffering of Jews in the Great War. Together, the war experience, American ascendancy, the Balfour Declaration, the Russian Revolution, the new states of East Central Europe, and new migration restrictions completely transformed Jewish life across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The chapter then provides a European, American, and Jewish genealogy for the emergence of American Jewish humanitarianism prompted by the war. It summarizes the narrative arc of the book, chapter by chapter, from relief to the Eastern war zones during American neutrality, to postwar emergency relief with other American organizations, to the development of several thematic forms of long-term relief across East Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several characteristics of international Jewish humanitarianism in this era are explained, such as its grounding in American pluralism, welfare state Progressivism, and diaspora connections. This history is both a Jewish intervention into the field of humanitarianism history and a rethinking of the master narrative of humanitarianism via the Jews.

Within weeks of the Great War’s outbreak, American Jews rushed to send relief for Jews caught in the crossfire of crumbling empires. To aid Jewish war sufferers, American Jews founded the Joint Distribution Committee. To move aid in wartime, American Jews worked with the US government, the largest neutral power. Cash aid traveled to Jews in war zones through the US diplomatic pouch and family connections. Preexisting Jewish organizations in Europe delivered the monies. The war promoted the growth of new American charitable organizations, and these organizations took their American visions abroad to help others, with the support of the US government, which had no government programs like USAID in place at the time. American Jews joined America’s expanding state at the critical juncture of the war, wandering into the center of American foreign policy and less official humanitarian relief initiatives to carry out basic relief to Jews abroad. They became more “American,” while relying on the Jewish diasporic network and immigrant practices.