This lecture will bring together the histories and historiographies of the Second World War’s Asia-Pacific Theater and the Holocaust by centering the life-stories of Jewish refugees who arrived in the Philippines between 1938 and 1941, escaping the grip of Hitler’s Nazi regime. Thinking about first-person Jewish sources as “lived” archives, this presentation asks the following questions: How did Jewish refugees in the Philippines perceive, negotiate, and make sense of their displaced but continued lives within sociopolitical and geopolitical uncertainty? To what extent did exile in a tropical archipelago inflected by colonialism and transposed by imperial subordination and warfare vitiate their identities and senses of community and belonging? In answering these questions, this study functions not only as a localized study but also as a historiographical corrective. Attending to the inner and outer horizons of displacement in the Philippines challenges and nuance the ways historians have generally represented Jewish refugees in the colonial world. Accordingly, the kaleidoscopic dimensionality of Jewish exile in the “pearl of the Orient seas” beckons a history from within: a reorientation of history away from the austerity of history-as-object and towards the intimacy of history-as-lived. In turn, this presentation will tell not a story of passivity and teleology, but one of agency and possibility.

This is the second program in a JDC Archives webinar series Across Oceans, Across Cultures: Jewish Refuge in East Asia and the Role of JDC.

James Carl Osorio is a PhD student in History at Brown University. He is interested in the phenomenological and everyday aspects of society and culture in the context of the Holocaust, war, mass atrocities, and refugeehood. He has received grants and fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), National World War II Museum, Brown University’s Watson Institute-Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, among others. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies and the International Journal Armenian Genocide Studies. James Osorio is the recipient of the 2025 Fred and Ellen Lewis/JDC Archives Fellowship. This fellowship allowed him to begin his long-term research on the lives of Jewish refugees in the Philippines.