Jewish Studies Talk: Ethan Katz- “The Jewish Resistance in Algiers During WWII”
The Jewish Studies Program is delighted to announce its first speaker for the spring semester: Dr. Ethan Katz, who will be speaking on February 11th, at 7 pm, at the Alpert JCC (3801 E. Willow St., Long Beach). His topic will be the Jewish resistance in Algiers on the eve of Operation Torch.
Despite being one of the most strategically consequential Jewish resistance networks of World War II, the Algiers insurgency remains little known and even less understood. When the Allies landed in North Africa on November 8, 1942, their path into Algiers was smoothed by a clandestine movement in which several hundred liberal Jewish shopkeepers, students, doctors, lawyers, and civil servants teamed with a handful of arch-conservative French army officers and businessmen.
Some 85 percent of the shock troops who took part in the Algiers action were Jewish. Stripped of their French citizenship in October 1940 by the Vichy regime, these Jews were fighting back. A number of their companions who helped to coordinate the resistance were monarchists or other right-wing nationalists with authoritarian tendencies; these conservatives were generally sympathetic to the social policies of the Vichy regime, including its antisemitism, but they could not abide Vichy's decision to stop fighting the Germans. Thus, the Algiers underground was notable for its impact and for the unusual alliance at its heart.
Dr. Ethan Katz is an associate professor at UC Berkeley focusing on the history of exclusion, belonging, and inter-ethnic relations for Jews and Muslims in France and the Francophone world. He’s published The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France in 2015; a co-edited book, Colonialism and the Jews, in 2017; and is currently working on his third book, Freeing the Empire: The Uprising of Jews and Antisemites That Helped Win World War II, from which this talk derives.
Like all Jewish Studies talks, this will be free and open to the public. To speed admission through security, the JCC asks that people rsvp first: .
