Jewish Service in WWII

I recently stumbled across a very interesting website from the University of Michigan titled, When Jews Were GIs: World War II and the Remaking of American Jewry.

It is actually an online adaptation of a lecture, delivered by Deborah Dash Moore (author of G.I. Jews), to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. The lecture doesn’t solely focus on Jewish wartime service. Ms. Moore discusses the cultural effect our service and the War had on Jewish life at home.

… after a devastating world war in which Jews sustained many times more deaths than Americans, American Jews emerged with the resilience and optimism to press their specifically Jewish claims on the world. Moore gives voice to the American Jews on the home front and in military service during the war who experienced anti-Semitism and witnessed the transformation of American sentiment firsthand. As Moore demonstrates, this generation, who fought anti-Semitism to go to war, returned home ready and able to transform American Jewry.

The website is setup in several sessions with discussion topics and thinking points for each session/topic. I think this would be a perfect tool for a Sunday school lesson or two and would even fit in well in a history course. Either way, it is an interesting read and I encourage you to check it out.