From the Pages of Yedies

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

In 1945, YIVO announced an essay contest on the theme of "My Experiences and Observations as a Jew and a Soldier in World War II." Fifty-two essays were received as submissions and in December 1946, Yedies reported on the award of prizes to the winners.

The contest may have marked one of YIVO’s first comprehensive attempts to reach out to native-born American Jews, just five years after the institution’s relocation to New York from Poland. As Yedies notes, most of the contest entrants were second-generation Americans. Only a few essays were written in Yiddish; the majority of submissions were written in English.

Heading up the team of judges was John Dollard, the noted Yale University social psychologist, best known for the “frustration-aggression hypothesis,” an attempt to explain scapegoating and violence. He also presided over a study, "Fear and Courage under Battle Conditions," for the U.S. Department of War in 1942-1945.

Submissions to the contest are preserved in the YIVO Archives in RG 110 Memoirs of American-Jewish Soldiers. They served as a key source for Deborah Dash Moore’s landmark 2009 book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, a full-length study of the experiences of some of the half a million Jews who fought in the U.S. armed forces during World War II and the ways in which those experiences shaped Jewish life in America in the decades to come.