Daniella Doron's recent book is a welcome contribution to French history and the history of childhood and will interest advanced students and scholars in these areas. Doron is not the first to point out the centrality of children to French Jewish reconstruction.Footnote ¹ However, she favors a broad approach that takes into account the changing notions of family in Europe. This unique perspective unearths a new understanding of the postwar period specifically because Doron successfully connects community to state.

Situated between the Holocaust and the arrival of North African Jewry, the postwar period was for the most part ignored by historians until the 1990s. Annette Wieviorka opened the field, yet it was Bernard Wasserstein's argument that European Jewish life was disappearing in that period that provoked a new wave of scholarship.Footnote ² Maud Mandel's important study, David Weinberg's recent book, and my own scholarship on the role of American Jewish organizations in postwar France build a strong counterargument to Wasserstein's moribund image of French Jewish life.Footnote ³ Doron's book should be situated in this historiographical trend: by exploring how Jews in France insisted on their ideals on children, even when faced with resistance from the French state, she demonstrates this population's agency. However, she argues that “even though French Jews jumped into the task of reconstruction with vigor and energy, their underlying mood spoke to their sense of crisis and anxiety” (4). Her scholarship thus provides a nuanced “middle-of-the-road” take on Wasserstein.

The book includes five chapters. Chapter 1 tackles the question of Holocaust memory and argues that children were central to forging early discussions of the genocide. However, in Doron's words, the child victim as metaphor for the Holocaust “proved frustratingly problematic and slippery” because Jewish children were “politicized and universalized by competing interest groups” (32). Taking issue with Wieviorka's argument that French Jews were unable to impose their specific experience of genocide in French postwar memory, Doron shows how Jewish children were instrumentalized by all, from Jewish organizations to the larger French public. Keeping with current historiographical trends that refute the “myth of silence,” such as François Azouvi's recent book of the same title (which she did not cite),Footnote ⁴ Doron convincingly argues that French Jews evoked children to insist on the specific Jewish experience during WWII, which differed from the dominant French discourse of universal suffering.

By focusing on custody battles over Jewish children in chapter 2, Doron portrays an assertive postwar Jewish leadership, willing to engage in conflict with state agencies in order to recover children from the Christian families that had protected them. French officials, however, argued that a “loving [non-Jewish] family” better suited the best interests of the child. For French policy makers, the family was understood as a privileged site for the transmission of republican values. French Jews also placed family (and its reunification) on a pedestal. However, for Jewish organizations, the unprecedented crisis cast doubt on the ability of Jewish families to protect the community's most precious resource: its youth. Collective homes were preferred for this population. Doron thus shows that French Jews differed in their view of the family from the larger French society at a moment when the state was defining the contours of belonging, both in continuity and rupture with Vichy. If Jewish adults were deemed undesirable immigrants to postwar French demographers, Jewish children, as seen in Doron's analysis of the Finaly affair, were seen as malleable and useful contributers to the French nation.

Doron's portrait of a proactive yet fragile Jewish population takes shape in chapter 3, on the debates surrounding collective life. Analyzing the views of Jewish social workers and children, Doron develops her argument on the paradoxical importance of family as a site for Jewish renewal and the simultaneous embrace of collective methods for raising children. If a perceived failure of the family caused social workers to initially encourage collective homes, these pedagogical methods soon gave way to doubt. Would youth raised in collective homes function as normal adults? Educators feared a “silver-spoon syndrome” (149) with deeper implications for future Jewish families. Would girls learn to care for their children and families? Doron's analysis of children's publications shows that they too debated the merits of collective homes, but also broached topics that remained taboo among adults, such as French collaboration.

Healing trauma was one of the major pedagogical goals of the children's homes, and chapter 4 fittingly analyzes how child-welfare experts addressed it. Doron argues that “the wide range of psychological work that revolved around Jewish youth speaks to an explicit concern about demographic survival” (164). Doron sees a marked difference in the approaches of Jewish and non-Jewish experts. Taking issue with the “Gaullist myth of universal victimhood” (173), Jewish experts recognized the trauma of Jewish children and judged Jewish children's homes as necessary healing sites. Non-Jewish experts, however, feared such homes would exacerbate feelings of separation, and create “ghettos” (176). Doron provides a fascinating portrait of the attempts to rehabilitate the Buchenwald boys, detailing the frustrated efforts of Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants employees. Contrary to Beth Cohen's portrayal of social workers as “ignorant and insensitive” (196) to the plight of Holocaust survivors, Doron shows their genuine attempts to nudge these adolescents into French society.

Chapter 5 questions the persistence of communal divisions and argues that French Jews moved toward cooperation during this period. If the upheaval of the immediate postwar period gave way to greater stability, French Jews still perceived a crisis among youth and families in the early 1950s. Fearing assimilation, the French Jewish community, Doron argues, worked together in new ways to embrace new forms of Jewish identity in order keep youth in the communal fold. Building on Mandel's and my own work on the “Jewish Marshall Plan,” Doron analyzes the importation of Jewish community centers, showing that “French Jews adapted and reshaped American models to fit French needs” (228). Such programs invited more flexible, pluralistic identities.

Doron reveals parts of the postwar revival that had been hidden from view. Some minor criticism can be made, however. From a methodological point of view, Doron's rich sources could have been complemented by oral history interviews. A discussion defending this choice and on the deontological issues of working with case files would have been welcome. At times, one seeks quantification of the trends Doron observes. For example, how many Jewish child custody battles really were there? One could also take issue with the term “loving family” that Doron uses to qualify French ideals on child placement. Documenting the French expressions to convey this ideal would have been welcome. Finally, in both chapters 3 and 4, Doron asserts that the postwar period bolstered the French identity of French Jews. This argument requires, in my opinion, greater development.

These minor criticisms do not detract from the significance of Doron's Jewish Youth and Identity in situating the importance of youth to postwar European Jewish revival and identifying the forces that shaped Jewish families in this moment of transition.