Description
Book SynopsisThe present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.
Trade Review“Years after the events, the subject of gender and family during the Holocaust began to be researched and written about by scholars, and this volume is a welcome addition to the topic.”
— Michlean Lowy Amir, AJL News and Reviews
“The publication If This is A Woman, edited by an international early career stage researchers’ group, is not only an insightful contribution to history and memory studies, it also makes a necessary political statement in times where gender studies and the social position of women are experiencing backlashes across the world. The high level of self-reflection is a very characteristic feature of this volume and may be a symptom of the new generation of researchers reflecting on their own work and how they even are influenced by power imbalances in academia … All contributions have been thoroughly researched and edited. … The strength of this book… is that it provides new research on sources that are not available in English. The volume also demonstrates that historical research on gender and war is addressing very pressing issues.”
— Elisa-Maria Hiemer, H Soz Kult
“What sets this volume apart from the other Holocaust scholarship are the introductions to new paths of research that use gender as a subject and a lens, and the fact that it features scholars whose work is otherwise unknown to English-language audiences… [T]he real success of the book is that it teases out exciting new horizons for Holocaust research, giving readers insight into questions previously unasked and looking at sources in innovative and exciting ways, such as Vastenhout’s examination of the Jewish councils and Zabransky’s analysis of the connections between religion and sexuality.”
— Morgan Morales, H-Judaic
“[T]his newest volume offers a unique focus on Eastern Europe and features approaches to gendered experiences of the Holocaust that are far more theoretically and methodologically rigorous. … Almost all the chapters in the volume utilize the micro-historical method to inform their theoretical engagement with gendered experiences of the Holocaust. As such, If This Is a Woman is a veritable repository of micro-historical research, which further magnifies its value as a methodological exemplar for future Holocaust research. … As a result, the book is not simply valuable to those scholars looking for chapters relevant to their own specific localities of interest, but also to scholars searching for examples of theoretical rigor at the micro-scale.”
— Catharine Aretakis, Utrecht University, European Journal of Jewish Studies
"If This Is a Woman, a collection of well-documented scholarly essays, brings us new insights on women and gender during the Holocaust. Originating in Slovakia, the birthplace of Holocaust heroes Gisi Fleischmann and Haviva Reick, this book is an important contribution to giving women their place in Holocaust history. With the focus on East-Central Europe and some essays the result of research in Russian, Polish, Slovakian, or Ukrainian archives, the book gives English language readers access to important new information on women and gender."
— Rochelle G. Saidel, PhD, Founder and Executive Director, Remember the Women Institute, New York City
Table of ContentsTable of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: Unholy Alliances
Andrea Pető
Introduction
Denisa Nešťáková, Katja Grosse-Sommer, Borbála Klacsmann, and Jakub Drábik
Part One: Theoretical Reflections on a Gender Focus in Holocaust Studies
1. “Will You Hear My Voice?” Women in the Holocaust: Memory and Analysis
Dalia Ofer
2. A Familial Turn in Holocaust Scholarship?
Natalia Aleksiun
Part Two: Gender in Times of Occupation and Authoritarianism: Expectation and Reality
3. Masculinities under Occupation: Considerations of a Gender Perspective on Everyday Life under German Occupation
Agnes Laba
4. New Slovak Woman: The Feminine Ideal in the Authoritarian Regime of the Slovak State, 1939-1945
Eva Škorvanková
Part Three: Women’s Lives in Camps
5. “Our mother organized it all”: The Role of Mothers of Sereď Camp in the Memories of Their Children
Denisa Nešťáková
6. Women in the Ilava Camp as Political Detainees in 1939
Marína Zavacká
Part Four: Women in Positions of Community Leadership
7. Women in Dror and Gendered Experiences of the Holocaust?
Anna Nedlin-Lehrer
8. Female Involvement in the “Jewish Councils” of the Netherlands and France: Gertrude van Tijn and Juliette Stern
Laurien Vastenhout
Part Five: Women in the Resistance
9. “Ma’am, do you know that a Jew lives here?” The Betrayal of Polish Women and the Jewish Children They Hid during the Holocaust—the Case of Cracow
Joanna Sliwa
10. “And with these boots, I’m gonna run away from here”: The Significance of Female Narratives in the Sobibor Uprising and Its Aftermath
Hannah Wilson
11. “After all, I was a ‘female’ and a ‘yid’ to boot.” Jewish Women among Partisans in Lithuania, 1941–1944
Modiane Zerdoun-Daniel
Part Six: Sexuality and Sexual Violence
12. Listening to Women’s Voices: Jewish Rape Survivors’ Testimonies in Soviet War Crimes Trials
Marta Havryshko
13. Male Jewish Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany
Florian Zabransky
Contributors
