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List of contents
List of Contributors
Foreword, David Gill (New York German Consul-General, USA)
Women Defying Hitler: An Introduction, Mordecai Paldiel (Yeshiva University, USA) and Nathan Stoltzfus (Florida State University, USA)
1. Cumulative Radicalization: Intermarriage under Hitler and Remembrance, Nathan Stoltzfus (Florida State University, USA)
2. Whoever Saves One Life, Saves an Entire World: The Women Rescuers of Jews, Mordecai Paldiel (Yeshiva University, USA)
3. Resisting Obliteration: Learning about the Lives and Deaths of Jewish Women during the Holocaust Judy Baumel-Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University and the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Israel)
4. Defiance and Resistance to Nazism from the Perspective of Gender, Class and Generation, Volker Berghahn (Columbia University, USA)
5. The Women's Protest on Rosenstrasse between Commemoration, Idealization and Debate, Susanne Heim (Freiburg University, Germany)
6. Rescue through Intervention in the Nazi Decision Making Process: Protest in Goebbel's Berlin, Nathan Stoltzfus and Chris Osmar (both Florida State University, USA)
7. Gariwo's Philosophy: Educate to Optimism and Responsibility through the Memory of the Righteous, Gabriele Nissim (Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide Organization (GARIWO), Italy)
8. Women and Resistance: New Perspectives on Germany and France, Anne Nelson (Columbia University, USA)
9. Jewish Women Rescuers of Jews, Mordecia Paldiel (Yeshiva University, USA)
10. Is Food Protest Political? Women's Demonstrations in Occupied France, Paula Schwartz (Middlebury College, USA)
11. Reflections on Rosenstrasse: With an Excerpt from Broken Glass, Broken Lives -- A Jewish Girl's Survival Story in Berlin, 1933-1945, Ruth Wiseman (Rita Kuhn's daughter)
12. The Mischlinge Expose: Stories of Assimilation and Conversation, Carolyn Enger (descendant of an intermarried couple
Epilogue, Mordecai Paldiel (Yeshiva University, USA)
Appendix
Select Bibliography
Index
About the author
Nathan Stoltzfus is Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Hitler's Compromises (2016) and Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (1996), which was a co-recipient of the Institute of Contemporary History's Fraenkel Prize and acknowledged as a New Statesman 'Book of the Year'. He is also the co-editor, with Robert Gellately, of Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (2001) and, with Henry Friedlander, of Nazi Crimes and the Law (2008).Mordecai Paldiel is Adjunct Professor in Jewish History at Yeshiva University, USA. He is the former Director (1984-2007) of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, Israel. Professor Paldiel is also the author of several books, including Saving One's Own: Jewish Rescuers during the Holocaust (2017) and The Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (2007).Judy Baumel-Schwartz is Director of the Schulman School of Basic Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, memory, the State of Israel, and commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (1998), Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the making of Collective Israeli Memory (2010), Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938-1945 (2012) and Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women (2013), My Name is Freida Sima: The American-Jewish Women's Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina (2017), and A Very Special Life: The Bernice Chronicles (2017).
Summary
This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler’s dictatorship. Paying acute attention to the differences that gender made, Women Defying Hitler examines the forms of women’s defiance, the impact these women had, and the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced. Several essays also address the special problems of the memory and historiography of women’s history during World War II, and the book features standpoints of historians as well as the voices of survivors and their descendants.
Notably, this book also serves as a guide for human behaviour under extremely difficult conditions. The book is relevant today for challenging discrimination against women and for its nuanced exploration of the conditions minorities face as outspoken protagonists of human rights issues and as resisters of discrimination. From this perspective the voices being empowered in this book are clear examples of the importance of protest by women in forcing a totalitarian regime to pause and reconsider its options for the moment. In revealing so, Women Defying Hitler ultimately foregrounds that women rescuers and resisters were and are of great continuing consequence.
Foreword
A collection of essays that explores and analyses various forms of women’s rescue and defiance during World War II.
Additional text
Women Defying Hitler: Rescue and Resistance under the Nazis is essential reading for anyone interested in women and women's studies, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Nazi Germany. While many contributions provide new perspectives on prominent incidents of resistance such as the "Red Orchestra" or the Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin, many hitherto little-known women's groups and individual heroes in a variety of countries are also covered. Moreover, this volume is important not just for the rich empirical detail, but also for advancing theories regarding what constitutes resistance, what is unique about women's agency in such a context, and the complicated ways that women (and men) tried to push back and delegitimize a genocidal regime. Finally, the integration of several survivors' and descendants' testimonies adds to the import of this cutting-edge collection.
