Essay #115: Maria Chomard, ‘To Save the Saviours: Reorganising Anarchist Solidarity in Europe after World War II’

In this essay, Maria Chomard examines the transatlantic anarchist mutual aid initiative after World War II, focusing on its attempted reunification and the tensions between universalist politics and Jewish postwar relief. Through this case, she argues that the Holocaust constituted a structural rupture in anarchism’s social and moral economy, reshaping practices of solidarity and contributing to the movement’s postwar crisis.

Maria Chomard is a historian with a Ph.D. from the University Paris 8 Vincennes — Saint-Denis, specializing in transatlantic Jewish anarchism. She recently published “To Save the Saviors: Reorganizing Anarchist Solidarity in Europe after World War II,” in S. Korbel and P. Strobl (eds.), Practices of Reunification: The Continuation of Refugee Life after 1945 (Routledge, 2025).

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