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Paul Lerner, Robin Judd. Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 432–433, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae579
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Robin Judd’s book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust centers the figure of the Jewish war bride, a previously all but neglected subject in modern Jewish- and 20th-century US and European historiography. Judd frames the Jewish war bride in legal, social, gender, and cultural historical contexts and follows these figures through the Holocaust and post-Holocaust landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America, among other places. Jewish war brides and their families, as Judd makes clear, faced unique challenges before and after emigration which, in significant ways, set them apart from the broader war bride population—the civilian women who married male servicemembers (and in rare cases the civilian men who married female servicemembers)—and which Judd uses as an entry point into her rich and multilayered study.
Between Two Worlds is elegantly crafted and beautifully written, making it a pleasure to read and suggesting that its reach may well extend beyond purely academic circles. Judd deftly intertwines biographical accounts of her fascinating subjects (including, in the conclusion, the stunning story of her own grandparents) and their often epic struggles with the legal, political, religious, and social situation in allied occupied Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war, making this book at once intensely human and rigorously scholarly, shifting back and forth, as it does, between individual narratives and broader social and political forces. The structure is compelling: The chapters foreground key themes and stages—liberation, encounter, courtship and marriage, immigration, and acculturation—as the narrative moves through time from the war’s immediate aftermath through internment in displaced persons camps; legal, religious, and community struggles over marriage and citizenship applications; immigration stories; and then issues of integration and acculturation in new homelands rife with antisemitic prejudice, racism, and Cold War paranoia.
