February 28 at 1pm
Shortly after the end of World War II, the international Jewish health care organization Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) opened a branch within the Jewish community of Morocco, still part of French North Africa before its independence in 1956. Together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), OSE-Morocco set-up socio-medical services and promoted preventive health care and education, particularly addressing the health of children and of those living in poverty. What made the health of Moroccan Jews such a pressing issue in the late 1940s? What does this tell us about the shifting currents in post-Holocaust Jewish humanitarianism? This presentation explores how both local community leaders and international Jewish organizations assigned a new urgency to the state of impoverished Jews in French Morocco, and how health care raised questions about state and community responsibilities and Jewish belonging in postwar North Africa.
To RSVP for this event, please email Dr. Miriam Mora
Julia Schulte-Werning is a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. Her research interests are at the intersection of Jewish history, the history of humanitarianism, and the history of health and medicine. In her PhD project, she examines the activities of Jewish humanitarian organizations that provided healthcare for Moroccan Jews after World War II into the 1960s. Exploring how Jewish futures were negotiated through healthcare, she aims to shed new light on Jewish humanitarian internationalism and public health in a post-Holocaust world marked by decolonization. Currently, she is a Bookhalter Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, New York, conducting research at the YIVO Archives.
Jonathan Wyrtzen is Associate Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and History at Yale University. His research engages a set of related thematic areas that include empire and colonialism, state formation and non-state forms of political organization, ethnicity and nationalism, and religion and socio-political action in North Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere. He has published two award-winning books, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity(Cornell, 2015) and Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia, 2022). His current project, "Nation in Empire," explores how spatial and symbolic boundaries were recurrently drawn and contested in relation to phases of overland and overseas imperial expansion and contraction in the long 19th century, using the United States, French, and British empires as companion comparative cases.
