The Howard Rein Lecture: The Great War and the Inception of Jewish Medical Humanitarianism Event

International humanitarianism has long been associated with rapid medical aid, especially due to the Red Cross. However, Jewish international humanitarianism grew out of the educational reform programs and rights advocacy of Jewish elites in the metropoles of the great European empires, who were broadly focused on educational reform from the mid 19th century. Responding to the crisis of the First World War, the new American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee drew Jewish philanthropy into the orbit of mainstream wartime humanitarianism and in so doing created a convergence between Jewish medical professionals and social reform. Clinics thereafter replaced schools as the site of Jewish internationalism. This lecture will explore international Jewish humanitarianism in the age of the Great War, with particular attention to public health and its legacy.

This event is a hybrid event, meaning you can attend in-person or online via Zoom.

About the Speaker

Jaclyn Granick is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at Cardiff University. She won a National Jewish Book Award (US) and a BIAJS special mention for her monograph International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge University Press 2021). She also co-edited with Abigail Green a special issue, “Gendering Jewish Inter/Nationalism,” of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2022). She completed her BA at Harvard University, undertook her postgraduate work at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is now researching Jewish women’s international activism and is a co-Investigator for an AHRC project on Jewish Country Houses.