Gender and the Holocaust

Gender and the Holocaust

Spring (9 - 13 hours) | This course is completed

10 Hilton Field Road Hanover, NH 03755 United States

Founders Room

NEW

4/15/2019-5/20/2019

9:30 AM-11:30 AM EDT on Mon

$60.00

The earliest research and writing on the Holocaust were largely male-driven. Although this first generation of historical research and personal writings laid the foundation for much of the work that would follow, women historians and survivors began, by the 1980s, to challenge the template created by their more traditional male predecessors. We will read two Holocaust memoirs written by Jewish women. Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, focuses primarily on the two years she and her mother spent in the Paris apartment of their Christian caregiver Mémé, who hid them during the war. Edith Bruck’s Who Loves You Like This provides an intimate look at the life of a teenage girl before, during, and after the Holocaust. Taken together, the two memoirs offer a fresh look at this terrible period in human history, and disclose the many ways in which the experiences of Jewish girls and women differed from those of Jewish boys and men. A course packet of historical essays will contextualize these primary sources.

  • Required Texts:
  • Rue Ordener, Rue Labat - Sarah Kofman (ISBN-13: 978-0803277809)
  • Who Loves You Like This - Edith Bruck (ISBN-13: 978-0966491371)
  • There is a required reading packet.
Deutsch, Phyllis

Phyllis Deutsch holds a PhD in modern European history from New York University. For several years, she taught history at NYU, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and the University of Pennsylvania. For 15 years, she served as editor-in-chief at University Press of New England, where she published numerous titles in the fields of 19th century history, literature, and culture. She is currently a Lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College.