If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust

by Denisa Nestáková (Editor), Katja Grosse-Sommer (Editor), Borbála Klacsmann (Editor), Jakub Drábik (Editor)

Overview

The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius UniversityBratislava 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644697108
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	12/14/2021
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Denisa Nešťáková holds a PhD in history. Her main interest is the history of the Holocaust and gender studies in East-Central Europe. She is an external researcher at Comenius University, Bratislava, where she is working on her postdoctoral project “Women and Men in the Labor Camp Sereď, Slovakia.” As a research associate at the Herder Institute, she focuses on the history of family planning in Czechoslovakia.

Katja Grosse-Sommer is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. She holds a master's degree in Holocaust and Genocide studies from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the Paideia Jewish Studies Program. She has been involved in organizing various conferences, events, and exhibitions related to National Socialist persecution and its remembrance. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and commemoration, and modern Jewish history.

Borbála Klacsmann received a master’s in history from Eötvös Loránd Universityand a master’s in comparative history with a specialization in Jewish studies from Central European University(2012). Since September 2015 she has been a doctoral student at the Department of History at the University of Szeged and a member of the Hungarian research group of Yad Vashem. Her work centers on the Holocaust and its aftermath in Hungary.

Jakub Drábik is a historian mainly interested in comparative fascism studies, but covers a broad range of twentieth-century history topics in his research and teaching. He completed his doctorate at Charles Universityin Prague in 2014, and since 2016 has worked at the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences, and taught at Masaryk Universityin Brno.

Table 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

Editorial Reviews

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

“The volume is… a welcome and useful reminder of the necessity and value of a gender-sensitive approach to the study of the Holocaust. Nearly 40 years after the spat about Joan Ringelheim’s article discussing a feminist approach, it is time to take stock of scholarly achievements in the by now identifiable field, and If This Is a Woman does a great job doing so. … [T]he book is coherent; it offers a focused investigation of various dimensions of the Holocaust and World War II. … Critically exploring the experience of females, gender relations, representation and politics, as well as sexuality and sexual violence under the Nazi regime… will offer a toolbox for the struggle against the conservative and authoritarian regimes in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and elsewhere. Refreshing is the reminder that feminist perspectives must not only shape our methodologies, but ought to also encourage us to intervene in institutionalized exclusionary academic practices by creating spaces of constructive critique benefiting junior and female scholars. Lastly, the volume puts forth the work of scholars from, and studies of the Holocaust in the region and thus adds an important perspective on gender ideologies as well as victim experiences under German occupation and in camps and ghettos. … All chapters are concise and well argued… Several chapters provide not only well-researched and argued studies of individual aspects, they also chart paths for future research.”

— Anika Walke, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung

"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

From the Publisher