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Thursday, April 23, 2026
12pm-1:15pm (US Eastern Time)
ZOOM (Webinar)
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From 1938 to1939, Shanghai saw an influx of primarily Central European Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust in Europe. These refugees joined existing Jewish communities in Shanghai, from Russian Jews who had fled the Russian Revolution twenty years earlier to prominent British families like the Sassoons and Kadoories. Many of the refugees who made it to Shanghai were musicians who brought their musical training with them and often joined an international music community. The refugees stayed in Shanghai until the defeat of the Axis powers, and the majority of them left before the 1949 Cultural Revolution in China.
Drawing from concert programs, magazines, newspapers, and JDC records, this lecture will explore how aid from the JDC and similar organizations supported different aspects of the musical activity of Jewish refugees in wartime and immediate post-war Shanghai, focusing on refugee organizations like the Shanghai Jewish Youth Community Center and the Shanghai Musicians Association of Stateless Refugees. The JDC also provided aid in intangible ways, like helping refugees with placemaking, promoting the development and performance of musical skills, and spearheading community building during hardship. Ultimately, these sources reveal how aid came in many forms, including the support of musical and cultural performances as a means of enduring refugee life.
This is the third program in the JDC Archives webinar series Across Oceans, Across Cultures: Jewish Refuge in East Asia and the Role of JDC.
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Brenna Miller is a PhD student in Musicology at The Ohio State University School of Music. She received a Bachelor of Music in Woodwind Performance and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Florida State University. She has held fellowships at The Ohio State University and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and has received grants from the American Musicological Society, Ohio State University’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and the Ohio State University East Asian Study Center. Brenna is a recipient of the JDC’s 2025 Fred and Ellen Lewis/JDC Archives Fellowship.
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The views and opinions expressed in the public program are those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect the position of the JDC.
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The JDC Archives houses one of the world’s most significant collections of modern Jewish history. Comprising the organizational records of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the world’s leading Jewish humanitarian organization, the archives includes over 3 miles of text documents, 150,000 photographs, a research library of more than 6,000 books, 1,100 audio recordings including oral histories, and a video collection.
With records of activity in more than 90 countries dating from 1914 to the present, the JDC Archives is located in two centers, New York City and Jerusalem, and is open to the public by appointment. For more information, visit archives.jdc.org. For more information on JDC Archives Fellowships, visit the Fellowships page.
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