World War I and the Jews

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland.  She is the author of The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (1983) and Constructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (2001) and co-editor, with Pieter M. Judson, of Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (2005). 

Jonathan Karp is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University. He is the author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1838 (2008) and editor of several academic collections, including, with Adam Sutcliffe, Philosemitism in History (2012) and the Cambridge History of Judaism in the Early Modern Period (2017). He was Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society from 2010-2013.