When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, following the Second World War and the Holocaust, only remnants of the centuries-old Ashkenazi civilization in Eastern Europe remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction. Although scholars have seemingly examined every aspect of the Great War, the story how five million Jews in the Russian Empire experienced the war and its violence on the Eastern Front remains surprisingly understudied.

Incorporating insights from multiple archives, including the JDC Archives, A Nation of Refugees documents the creation of grassroots efforts among Jewish civilians and activists to aid Jewish communities displaced multiple times over the course of the war. It also traces the ways in which mass Jewish displacement linked to the creation of international Jewish relief organizations, including the Joint (JDC), that went on to play significant roles in subsequent global Jewish political, social, and economic development. Exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, A Nation of Refugees provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.

Polly Zavadivker is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies, at the University of Delaware. Her book A Nation of Refugees: World War I and Russia’s Jews was published with Oxford University Press in 2024. It received the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Honorable Mention for the Salo Baron Book Prize from the American Academy of Jewish Research, and was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist, for the JDC-Herbert Katzki award, for writing based on archival material. She edited and translated S. An-sky, The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front (Indiana University Press, 2016).