Over the past two decades or so historical scholarship on Jewish and non-Jewish refugees of the World War II era has grown significantly. With some exceptions, prior work tended to focus on the rescue of well-known individuals and stories of their success or failure to adapt to their new homes. Recent work instead centers squarely on the refugees in all their diversity, exploring the multifaceted experience of displacement in established and less known sites of emigration across the globe. By bringing together perspectives from European, Latin American, and U.S. settings, this panel opens up a conversation about how movement between refugees’ local, national, and supra-national contexts shaped refugee experiences and about the ways refugees re-imagined themselves and their cultural worlds. How did refugees remake themselves as Europeans, antifascists, and/or Jews through various cultural and political practices and via the connections they made within and across borders? How did those projects resonate after 1945 in European, Latin American, and Jewish cultures?

Taking exile as a multi-staged, multi-sited, and continuous process, the panel traverses the periods before, during, and after the war while grounding analysis of refugee experience in urban life in Europe and the Americas. Frances Tanzer’s paper transits between cities of the Hapsburg Empire, sites of refuge in the United States and Latin America, and postwar Austria to examine how Jewish popular performers built on prior experiences with itinerancy to confront the challenge posed by the Nazi period and its aftermath. Laura Gotkowitz focuses on spaces of social and political encounter in the city of La Paz to consider how connections and tensions between Jewish and political refugees reshaped European antifascism in World War II era Bolivia. Sheer Ganor uses the history of a school created by the anti-Nazi German-speaking community in Buenos Aires to explore how Jewish refugees reconciled competing pressures for belonging from the 1930s to the 1970s. A cross-cutting theme of the panel is how refugees imagined and re-imagined their places of refuge and the places from which they were expelled. The panel also accentuates the afterlives of exile and the ways that its cultural, political, and emotional consequences echoed in sites of refuge and places of return. Ultimately the panel contributes to a growing discussion of refugee experiences and aims to integrate them more fully into national, regional, and transregional histories. It speaks to scholars interested in forced migration, antifascism, and transatlantic connections of the World War II era.