David Laskin

The Great War marked the critical divide between the experiences of Jewish families in Europe and the United States. I will examine this divide by weaving individual family stories into the larger context of historic events on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the Great War uprooted and decimated the vast, deeply-rooted Jewish population that lived along the Eastern Front and set the stage for the catastrophe of the war that followed. German and Austrian Jews rallied loyally around their rulers, only to be accused of shirking by anti-Semitic officers. In the U.S., by contrast, the war drew immigrant Jews out of urban ghettos and pushed them into the mainstream. One hundred years later, it is clear that to understand contemporary Jewish identity one must grapple with the legacy of what happened to our families in the Great War. This is precisely the aim of my keynote address.