Italian Jewish Émigrés in the United States, 1938-1950

The archival work I carried out in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives forms one of the chapters in my doctoral dissertation. Whereas most historians assume that European Jewry ended in 1945 and gave way to America and Israel as the new centers of Jewish life, I argue otherwise. My dissertation shows that in the case of Italy, a vibrant European Jewish culture continued among refugee émigrés in the British Mandate of Palestine and in the United States, and among postwar survivors in Italy. This study reveals that despite the catastrophic effects of the Holocaust, Italian Jews maintained their attachment to Italy and to their prewar communal traditions well after the war.