Much of the scholarship on the myth of Czechoslovak exceptionalism overlooks its transnational dimensions and how it interacted with the United States’ own sense of exceptionalism. Similarly, studies of American Jewry during the Holocaust and the Cold War often neglect the Czechoslovak Jewish experience. Building on the work of scholars, including Jacob Labendz and Andrea Orzoff, my project brings these fields together to trace how Czechoslovak Jews navigated the promises and limits of both Czech and American “exceptionalisms.”
My research provides a historical analysis of how Czechoslovak Jewish survivors interpreted religion, antisemitism, and democracy, and how the Holocaust and resettlement reshaped their understandings. I examine two settings: their childhoods in the First Republic, where testimonies often recall an idealized childhood under President Masaryk, and their later lives as immigrants in the United States, arriving during the Cold War–era faith in American exceptionalism.
My sources include over one hundred survivor testimonies recorded in the United States between the 1980s and early 2000s, as well as archival materials from the Czech Republic, England, and the United States, including government documents, letters sent between governments, organizations, and ordinary individuals, and other artifacts. My sources also include newspaper articles across the United States, memoirs, and oral history interviews that I conducted with survivors and their descendants.
By reading these testimonies alongside other records, I uncover how survivors participated in shaping two overlapping narratives of moral exceptionalism. I argue that survivors’ reflections reveal what I call a form of “double exceptionalism”: a dual faith in Czechoslovak moral democracy and American liberal pluralism that both sustained and obscured their experiences. My research also highlights the significance of the Czechoslovak story within American historiography. Specifically, American actors utilized the Czechoslovak myth of exceptionalism, particularly in wartime events such as the commemoration of Lidice. My research reveals how the Czechoslovak myth was used for Allied propaganda while often ignoring Jewish suffering.
Visually, my poster will present key context, including the project’s geographic and chronological scope, my main research questions, excerpts from oral histories, side-by-side comparisons of interwar propaganda and survivor reflections to illustrate how national myth evolved into personal memory, the archives I consulted, and a list of the wide variety of primary sources that I have collected. The images on my poster will be comparative visuals of interwar democratic rhetoric and postwar American representations of freedom.