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This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the Jews of post-war France, Belgium, and the Netherlands reconstructed their communities in the period between 1945 and the early 1960s. During these years, the Jews of the three countries attempted not only to recover from the devastation of their recent past but also to lay the foundations for their future. International and American Jewish relief and political organizations played a seminal role in these efforts. As relief organizations began to realize that the majority of the surviving Jews in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands intended to remain where they were, they took an interest in helping to reshape communal life. The goal, as it emerged in discussions beginning in 1947, was to implement a ‘Jewish Marshall Plan’ that would enable viable settlements, such as those in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, to achieve stability and growth. Of the many external Jewish agencies that played a role in the efforts to reconstruct Jewish life in western Europe after 1945, three stand out: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known popularly in America as the JDC and in Europe as the Joint), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the World Jewish Congress (WJC).

This chapter uses an intersectional approach to analyse the practices and experiences of and reactions to anti-Jewish violence in Poland and Hungary from 1918 to 1922. It explores how people articulated the violence against Jews and shows that gender, age, political, and class hierarchies played important roles in people's interpretations of it and how it represented a break from 'normal times' or, more specifically, from established norms about who violence should touch and how it could be administered. The chapter then examines how Jewish communities, with the assistance of groups like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), sought to reconstruct Jewish life and shore it up against current and future threats, how the hierarchies shaped their strategies of self-defence, and how the relief organizations restored the hierarchies. It focuses primarily on the experiences of physical violence in the large Jewish communities of Lwów, Vilna, and Warsaw in Poland and Budapest in Hungary. While Poland and Hungary differed in significant ways, their Jewish communities' experiences and interpretations of violence shared common themes. Furthermore, the JDC's vision for Jewish communities had important gendered and classed components that shaped its relief and reconstructive work across all of eastern Europe.

This chapter explores shock imagery in late nineteenth-century missions and the First World War. When war struck, relief organizations proliferated on a scale that far outstripped previous humanitarian interventions. Among the tools they mobilized was sponsorship. The chapter discusses two programs: Near East Relief (NER) and Fatherless Children of France (FCF). Like many equivalent organizations, they operated out of New York City, were non-sectarian, and championed by elite donors. The chapter then focuses on new visual media, especially photography, that bolstered U.S. Christians' ability to incorporate absent/present children into the intimate spaces of family life, while honing a god's eye view of the world. It considers this visual media together with visceral (embodied) techniques as collaborative tools in emergency relief.

This chapter investigates the high level of support received by German-speaking refugees from relief organisations, such as the Jewish Refugees Committee and the Quakers, as well as from British cultural organisations like International PEN, Artists International Association (AIA) and so on, as well as the help they received from prominent individuals, such as George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, the journalist Wickham Steed, the Labour MP, D.N Pritt, the author Storm Jameson and many others. Some of these British friends and supporters also came under surveillance as a result of their links to refugees; it is known, for example, that MI5 kept files on a number of MPs who supported the refugees. In particular, the Security Service was nervous about possible collaboration between British and foreign Communists, even after the Soviet Union had become a war ally in June 1941.

Chapter 6 focuses on the crisis of anti-slavery activism after 1935. The paradoxes of the Ethiopian invasion, with its many facets of violence and compassion, marked the end of an era of humanitarian imperialism. In the wake of the conflict, the perpetration of war crimes by the Italian military, notably the use of poison gas, became a subject of international controversy. The war unleashed anti-imperialist sentiments and caused a rupture in the self-perception and reception of anti-slavery campaigners in Europe. The British capital became a pivot of anti-imperialist and pro-Ethiopian relief organizations that challenged the basic tenets of imperial paternalism, thus exposing the wide-reaching discontentment amongst colonial populations. Whereas the Italian anti-slavery organization fell victim to domestic squabbles, the British organization was forced to rearticulate its campaigning strategies in the light of impending war and the looming dismantlement of the imperial order.