Tale of Jewish war brides explored at Pitt
Captivated by a 'unique' story, Robin Judd discovered a historically familiar experience
Robin Judd, a history professor at The Ohio State University, has a new take on an old story. Following World War II, Jewish survivors — mostly women, but some men — married members of the Allied forces.
Speaking with the Chronicle before her Feb. 24 talk at the University of Pittsburgh, Judd said her grandmother belonged to the Jewish war bride demographic: “I learned of that when I was about 8 years old and was forever fascinated by it.”
As a child, Judd believed her grandmother’s status was unique.
It wasn’t until “I started doing the research I realized that her experience was in many ways much more common,” Judd said.
After completing her doctorate in Jewish and German history at the University of Michigan, Judd began teaching at The Ohio State University in 2000.
She didn’t start her Buckeyes tenure seeking to unravel the story of post-WWII marriage; earlier in her career she explored the history of religion, antisemitism and debates concerning circumcision and kosher slaughter in central Europe. In multiple classes, though, Judd included Holocaust survivor memoirs. Several of the materials, she said, included accounts written by women who describe “meeting the men that they would eventually marry.”
Reading the memoirs generated questions about the “uniqueness” of Judd’s grandmother’s experience, she said.
“I started to do the research — not sure whether the research would turn into an article or a book — and it became clear, as I started doing the research on this book project, that there was a book to be told and it was going to be a big book. And by that, I don’t mean in terms of page length, but rather that there were Holocaust survivors from all over Europe and North Africa who marry American, British and Canadian military personnel. And so it was going to be a transnational story, which would require me to learn military policies and various years of occupation, or immigration laws in different countries, and how those changed over time.”
Judd endeavored to tell the story by visiting archives in the U.S., Canada, England, Belgium and Israel. The trips furthered her appreciation of both her grandmother’s story and those of other Jewish war brides.
“The short of it is that, in some ways, her story was not at all uncommon: that for many Jewish women and some Jewish men, marriage to a member of the American, British or Canadian military allowed them an opportunity to immigrate,” she said.
Judd added that her work sparks “new ways of talking about the history of the Holocaust, and particularly some of the kind of gendered, if you will, approaches to ways of entering the history of the Holocaust.”
Judd’s efforts have garnered praise from academicians and Jewish readers. Her 2023 book, “Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust” received two National Jewish book awards and was named one of Jewish Women’s Archives’ Summer 2024 Book Club picks.
Coming to Pittsburgh is a chance to share stories from the text but also learn more about the people who fill its pages.
“There is a Pittsburgh angle that I’ll be talking about,” Judd said. Elements of the narrative “have been a mystery to me, so I probably will be asking if anyone knows anything more, or can point me to any directions.”
Along with searching for answers from Pittsburghers, Judd’s upcoming talk is an opportunity to remind listeners about not only the “intertwined” relationship between military personnel and survivors, but to understand how previous travails impact the present, she said. This is a story “around immigration and the challenges of immigration, and the sensitivities, perhaps, that we have today as 21st-century readers to that historical past.”
Judd’s talk, “Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust,” will occur at the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, room 501, on Feb. 24, from 6-7:15 p.m. PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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