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Office of American Absorption (OAA)
Just Folks is a fictional “volunteer work program” created by the OAA. Just Folks places Jewish children and teens with Gentile families for the length of a summer under the guise of broadening their horizons. In reality, the Just Folks program is designed to weaken and break up Jewish families with the ultimate goal of assimilating them into Gentile culture and weakening Jewish constituencies across America.
Just Folks Quotes in The Plot Against America
The The Plot Against America quotes below are all either spoken by Just Folks or refer to Just Folks. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5
Quotes
My brother had discovered in himself the uncommon gift to be somebody, and so while making speeches praising President Lindbergh and while exhibiting his drawings of him and while publicly extolling (in words written by Aunt Evelyn) the enriching benefits of his eight weeks as a Jewish farm hand in the Gentile heartland—while doing, if the truth be known, what I wouldn’t have minded doing myself, by doing what was normal and patriotic all over America and aberrant and freakish only in his home—Sandy was having the time of his life.
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Chapter 7
Quotes
A previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project [was] designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way “enrich” the “Americanness” of everyone involved. […] The underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections.
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Just Folks Term Timeline in The Plot Against America
The timeline below shows where the term Just Folks appears in The Plot Against America. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Following Christians
...for Kentucky. As part of a program created by Lindbergh’s Office of American Absorption called Just Folks , Sandy will be spending the next several weeks working on a tobacco farm in...
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...all about his summer, Aunt Evelyn is triumphant about her first tangible example of the Just Folks program’s success. Everyone else, however, is alarmed by how much Sandy has changed. Bess and...
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...interested in Sandy—the boy who has “made [them] all so proud” with his participation in Just Folks . Bengelsdorf, who is himself from South Carolina, tells Sandy all about the history of...
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...society. It is his own dream—and Lindbergh’s, too—that the Jewish children who participate in the Just Folks program will serve as models not just for one another, but for the adults in...
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...that Sandy has been selected by the rabbi personally as a recruiting officer for the Just Folks program office in New Jersey—Philip knows that this is Bengelsdorf’s “revenge.”
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Chapter 5: Never Before
...his unusual potential to be someone of importance, is greatly enjoying extolling the virtues of Just Folks and the OAA.
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...to tell them that she wants for Sandy to accompany her as an emissary of Just Folks , Herman flies off the handle and tells her to leave their family alone. He...
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Chapter 8: Bad Days
...measures against American Jews—only then, according to Bengelsdorf, did Lindbergh resist, instituting “token programs” like Just Folks and Homestead 42 to appease the Nazis. Von Ribbentrop’s state dinner was part of a...
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