Introduction

More than thirty years after the issue of gender was first raised in Holocaust research, much has been achieved in this regard by scholars in a number of disciplines, mainly in the areas of history and literature. This issue of Nashim is intended as a further contribution to a vibrant field of study into which many young scholars have entered. In the following pages, I would like first to offer some comments on the current state of research on gender and the Holocaust and then to discuss the contributions made by the articles published herein to this vast area of study and to Holocaust studies in general.

The apprehension and even hostility that greeted the first harbingers of research focusing on women in the Holocaust are no more. However, research and teaching in this area are still not central to scholarly work on the Holocaust, and a large proportion of those who do enter into this field are women. This may explain the prevalence of apologetic or even missionary-sounding titles like “What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust” or “The Contribution of Gender to the Study of the Holocaust.”¹ Such studies evince the need still felt to demonstrate the richness generated by gender analysis and reinforce its perspective in Holocaust studies.

The quest to study women’s experiences during the Holocaust followed upon the extensive writing on women’s history that began appearing from the 1970s on. This field of research opened up new topics and perspectives while giving rise to a broad methodological debate about the writing of history, the status of everyday life in the historical narrative and the identity of that narrative’s protagonists. Theories on the writing of social and cultural history opened up space for the new voices in the writing of history.² This approach gave rise to a demand for the inclusion of women at the core of the Holocaust narrative, where they had hitherto been marginalized or even effaced. Historians, sociologists and writers grew interested in studying and telling about women’s unique experiences in a hell shared by both sexes.

The first conference on women in the Holocaust, held in 1983 at Stern College in New York, was followed a decade later by the call of John K. Roth and Carol Rittner, in their pioneering volume Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, to pay attention to the different voices of the Holocaust’s protagonists.³ The impact of these scholarly events pushed researchers to try to map out conceptual frameworks for analyzing this topic. In the introduction to our 1998 volume Women in the Holocaust, Lenore J. Weitzman and I suggested such a framework, one embedded in a historical perspective.⁴ Since Jews lived in and were influenced by different environments, even as many of them shared bourgeois aspirations and values, we must recognize that they carried different social and cultural baggage. However, we concluded that despite the diversity of the Jewish experience in Europe and the class differences within and between communities, a number of categories could be defined to assist in creating a gendered analysis of Jewish responses to Nazi policy, including:

1. (1). Prewar roles and responsibilities of men and women.

2. (2). Anticipatory reactions of men and women to the Nazi regime and occupation.

3. (3). German policy toward and treatment of men and women.

4. (4). Responses of Jewish men and women to Nazi persecution.

These categories called for the employment of a comparative methodology with respect to gender and the geography of the Holocaust and for paying careful attention to the several stages of the war and the different arenas in which Jews strove to survive the persecutions and killings. They also required scrutiny of the historical background of the Jews in different European communities and within individual countries, as well as examination of public and private patterns of behavior. Once social class, education and age are taken into account, it becomes clear that gender, alongside other social categories, is a necessary factor in any comprehensive interpretation of human behavior. This framework suggested an innovative and creative reading of the available sources and a...