Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust?
- Did Gender Matter during the Holocaust?
Looking back on the past four decades of historical studies on Jewish women and the Holocaust is no small task. I started my own research in the 1970s, focusing first on the German Jewish feminist movement, the Jüdischer Frauenbund, and later on women's roles in Jewish families in late nineteenth-century Germany. My interest stemmed from my family's refugee history and from my engagement with the women's movement as a student. But it took a while for me to gain the courage to address Jewish women and families in Nazi Germany. It felt too close. Still, as with my other scholarship, I wondered, "Might women have experienced this era differently from men? And if so, how?"
Early Questions about Women and the Holocaust (1983–2000)
The early American scholars of women and the Holocaust assumed that the answer to these questions was yes, but we needed to do the research. I will start there, but first, a historical reminder: 1980s feminists may have propagated this agenda, but we did not know that questions about gender arose long before. Polish Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum's collection of testimonies, reports, and surveys in the Warsaw ghetto from 1939 until 1943, later known as the Oyneg Shabes project, asked questions of and about women, and many women participated in this undertaking. Philip Friedman, a Polish Jewish historian who survived Lvov in hiding, set a gendered agenda for future research (later published in English as Pathways to Extinction, 1980) as early as 1945.1 [End Page 37]
The first large-scale research impetus came in 1983. Scholars Joan Ringelheim and Esther Katz organized a pathbreaking conference in New York City entitled Women Surviving the Holocaust. For two days, four hundred survivors and feminist scholars tried to figure out whether and, if so, how gender mattered. At points, we broke into small survivor groups. I took notes for one such session and recall my surprise and confusion when many survivors both rejected the salience of gender and also highlighted it.2 In other words, these women claimed being a woman "didn't matter" and then described how, indeed, it mattered! I thought then and still think that many survivors did not want to support a feminist inquiry and yet hoped to tell their stories for posterity. That same year, Vera Laska, herself a survivor, published her Women in the Resistance and the Holocaust, using women's published testimonies.3 Perhaps due to the popularity of the women's movement on American campuses as well as in society more generally, these discussions and debates emerged in the United States first.
Twelve years after the New York gathering, in 1995, Dalia Ofer and Leonore Weitzmann organized the International Workshop on Women in the Holocaust at the Hebrew University, including American, Israeli, and German scholars who had begun to research this topic. Why did it take so long? The short answer is that we needed to do the research that connected women's history, memoirs, feminist theory, and the Holocaust. This took time. In the 1990s, for example, the annual Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust offered just two articles about women in its first three volumes.4
Feminist historians' focus on Jewish women caused some opposition in the 1990s, part of a conservative backlash against feminism. One critic accused women's and (female) gender studies scholars of enacting a "macabre sisterhood with the dead Jewish women of Europe," and others faulted feminists for using the Holocaust for their own agendas.5 Specifically, these critics saw a gender analysis as "privileging" women—that is raising women's suffering above that of men—and insisted on the irrelevance, indeed irreverence, of this scholarship.6
Thankfully, this debate died down quickly. Women's historians had always underlined that being Jewish mattered first and foremost. But as Joan Ringelheim wrote, "the end—namely annihilation or death—does not describe or explain the process."7 And as Mary Felstiner pointed out, "along the stations toward extinction . . . each gender lived its own journey."8 I added, rather defensively, but probably appropriately for 1998, that "to raise the issue of gender...
