La France et l’Exposition internationale de 1937 au prisme de la presse yiddish

Résumé 0

France and the World Fair of 1937 through the Prism of the Yiddish PressDuring the 1930s, Paris was home to approximately two million immigrants. Around 150,000 of these were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. This paper traces the development of the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair and places it within both its Parisian and Eastern European historical contexts. Through an analysis that focuses on coverage of the pavilion in the Eastern European Jewish press, I argue that the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion stood as an international marker of the development of Yiddish culture and a stand against the rising tide of fascism and authoritarianism in Europe. Buttressed by this particular 1930s context, Yiddish culture-makers in Paris created a cultural display that presented a global Yiddish culture that spoke to Jews and non-Jews around the world in their attempt to define Yiddish culture as a contribution to their specific Jewish and wider European communities.