Relief, rescue and reconstruction: Shanghai’s Jewish child refugees in JDC photography

This paper focuses on humanitarian photography taken of Jewish child refugees, who fled to Shanghai from various European countries during the Holocaust. Specifically, the paper will discuss photographs taken by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in the 1940s. This paper will argue that these photographs serve a dual function, depicting the children as both the future of the Jewish people and also proof of the need for future JDC work. In doing so, the paper seeks to understand how these photographs complemented (or deviated from) the organization's goals of rescue, relief and reconstruction, known as the 'three Rs'.