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Book Reviews 147 Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore 1. Weitzman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 402 pp. $35.00. In recent decades, as research in both Jewish women's studies and in Holocaust studies has proliferated and matured, increasing notice has been taken of the striking scarcity ofwomen~s voices in contemporary discourse about the Shoah. As Sara R. Horowitz, among others, has pointed out, it is not that women survivors have failed to produce diaries, memoirs, journals, novels, or vignettes; in fact, many have recorded their experiences in writing or in oral and videotaped testimony. Nevertheless, women's experiences are rarely presented as "typical" Holocaust stories; scholarly studies cite female accounts less frequently than the testimony of male survivors.! In literary and cinematic visions of the H.olocaust there are few depictions of the specific ways in which the Nazis persecuted women; female characters are usually marginalized in comparison to the male subjects who dominate the narrative. Acknowledgment that women suffered both as Jews and as women, and that women acted independently with heroism and compassion in desperate circumstances, continues to be rare in most ofthe scholarly and artistic representations of the Shoah. Women in the Holocaust, which presents an essential and comprehensive survey of recent work in this still controversial field, demonstrates the valuable insights that can emerge when the research paths ofHolocaust studies and Jewish women's studies intersect. While editors Dalia Ofer and Lenore 1. Weitzman readily acknowledge that gender was subordinate to racism in the Nazi determination to annihilate all Jews, they argue that asking questions about gender, listening to women's stories, and incorporating discussions ofthe different ways in which men and women experienced the Nazi terror expands our knowledge of this epoch in crucial ways. The 21chapters in this volume, which include historical studies, personal accounts, and literary analyses of Holocaust testimonies, are arranged under the following chronological rubrics: "Before the War," "Life in the Ghettos," "Resistance and Rescue," and "Labor Camps and Concentration Camps"; three concluding essays address larger thematic questions having to do with gender and the Holocaust. While a final essay in the collection, by Sara R. Horowitz, considers some works offiction and poetry, the emphasis of the anthology is strongly oriented towards historical analysis and various forms of personal testimonies. There are no studies, for example, of representations ofwomen in Holocaust films or television productions, either fictional or documentary. Ofer and Weitzman do not ignore the controversy studies like theirs has provoked. Critics have argued that differentiation of victims by gender distracts from the Nazis' systematic goal to murder all J~ws. Some have suggested that raising the question of gender is to impose today's concerns on the past, while others wish to avoid any 'Sara R. Horowitz, "Memory and Testimony ofWomen Survivors ofNazi Genocide," in Women ofthe Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, 1994), pp. 258-282. 148 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 distinctions and invidious comparisons among victims which could deflect attention from the central focus on Nazi policy. In his essay in this volume, Lawrence L. Langer argues that the role ofgendered behavior was severely diminished during the Holocaust period and played little part in survival or degree ofsuffering; he believes that to claim otherwise applies an artificial hierarchy in a darkness where only chaos prevailed. Ofer and Weitzman respond that "Rather than distracting us from the Nazi brutality against all Jews, these questions enhance our understanding ofit by locating it in the specificity of individual experiences." Moreover, they point out that such questions are not anachronistic: at the end of 1941 Emmanuel Ringelblum, the archivist and historian within the Warsaw ghetto, commissioned his colleague Cecilya Slepak to undertake a separate study of women (which survived the war) as part of his effort to preserve as many aspects as possible ofa community in confmement. As Joan Ringelheim reminds us in her essay, both Jewish men and Jewish women experienced umelieved suffering during the Holocaust, but their paths to annihilation were not always the same. She writes that "Jewish women carried the burdens of sexual victimization, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, killing of newborn babies...

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