“Before the war,” noted the journalist and communal activist Meyerkey2 in 1926,“there was hardly any Jewish activity outside religious and mutual aid associations... Today, things are different. Associations of all kinds—Zionist, athletic, mutual aid, and secular—are rising up and reclaiming Judaism as their own.” 3 As Meyerkey’s comments suggest, the appearance of new spaces for Jewish sociability, the expansion of Jewish popular education, and a proliferation of discussion among Jews and sympathetic non-Jews about the nature of Jewish identity and culture in the modern world constituted a major shift in French Jewish life in the 1920s. A number of interrelated factors—the rise of the Zionist movement, the sense of spiritual vacuum created by the First World War, and a much larger population of young people remaining in school through their teenage years—all contributed to the growth of Jewish community centers, youth groups, and educational societies. This phenomenon was not particular to France. From Vilna to Frankfurt to Minsk to Baghdad to New York, the 1920s were a period of cultural creativity and growth of associational life for Jews the world over. One of the distinguishing features of the Jewish cultural revival in France in the 1920s, however, was the degree to which French Jews understood the new forms of Jewish community life and self-expression that they created to be a product of their integration into French society rather than a rejection of it. 4 The antisemitic crisis