Exposing Yiddish Paris: the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair

Abstract

ABSTRACTDuring the 1930s, Paris was home to approximately two million immigrants. Around 150,000 of these were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who used Paris as the basis for a new Western European influenced Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism. This paper traces the high point of that interwar Parisian Yiddish internationalist cultural development, the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair. Through an analysis that places the pavilion within its immigrant Jewish and interwar Popular Front Parisian contexts, this article argues that the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion represented the culmination of decades of leftist cultural work in Paris. The Modern Jewish Culture pavilion highlighted both universal and particular aspects of Yiddish culture and placed them on display in the most international way possible. Buttressed by the rise in European fascism, antisemitism, and antifascism, Yiddish culture-makers in Paris created a cultural display that presented a sophisticated, global, pan-leftist Yiddish culture that spoke to Jews and non-Jews around the world in an attempt to preserve the burgeoning global Yiddish culture and stave off fascism.