This letter to Boris (Bernard) Bogen, head of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Poland, along with Adler’s larger diary, illustrates the ways in which American Jews involved themselves in international political discussions following the Great War. American Jews, who sat at the table in the Paris Peace Conference, hoped to make the world safer for Jews. As this letter states, men like Adler were alarmed by the eruption of anti-Semitic violence in Poland, which many believed could become a liberal multi-ethnic political economy. Adler saw Poland as a great experiment in modern Jewish politics: a republic where Jews were not only citizens, but constituted a key minority voting bloc in the largest multi-ethnic East European state. He writes to Bogen, because the American Joint Distribution Committee which he represented in Poland, exemplifies how American Jews used the formidable strength of their dollars to effect change in Poland.

While the intricacies of local politics caused the impact of American dollars to have differential effect in various locales in Poland, they gave men like Cyrus Adler, Jacob Schiff (also mentioned in the letter) and Boris (Bernard) Bogen a chance to spread their own cultural agenda. Wilson may have failed to convince the American government to involve themselves diplomatically in the politics of rebuilding in the region of Eastern Europe, it is clear that individual non-governmental organizations in America, like the JDC, and men like Cyrus Adler would assume the mantle of Wilsonian idealism as they distributed money and advocated for Jewish rights at the Paris Peace conference. This letter exemplifies why we must consider men like Adler—a private citizen using his economic might to affect change in the world around him—as we endeavor to expand the parameters of the Jewish political tradition.