HEROINES OF THE HOLOCAUST: NEW FRAMEWORKS OF RESISTANCE
AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
JUNE 15 and 16 2022
WAGNER COLLEGE HOLOCAUST CENTER
STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK
ORGANIZED BY PROFESSOR LAURA MOROWITZ AND PROFESSOR LORI WEINTROB
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OUR SYMPOSIUM PARTNER
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The activities of women during the Holocaust have often been forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or intentionally distorted. Jewish women and those of all faiths fought with dignity, compassion and courage to save others from the murderous Nazi regime in over 30 nations. Often overlooked, women as well as men played critical roles in uprisings against the Nazis in over 50 ghettos, 18 forced labor camps and 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Women were critical to the Jewish underground and other resistance networks both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false papers. Women played essential roles operating educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives. In other genocides, women also faced horrendous atrocities, yet distinguished themselves with resilience and acts of moral courage. This symposium hopes to create a new narrative around agency in the Shoah and other genocides, which may inspire transformative activism today.
From the groundbreaking 1983 conference on “Women and the Holocaust” at Stern College to the 2018 symposium on “Women, the Holocaust and Genocide” at Seton Hill University, research on gender issues has grown exponentially. Innumerable books, conferences, panels, films, journal special issues, and groups such as Remember the Women Institute, now document the inspiring lives of female participants. Yet, there remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pistols or pen. The leadership strategies, networks of defiance and testimony of better-known activists, such as Vitka Kempner-Kovner, Zivia Lubetkin, Vladka Meed, Sara Fortis, Gisi Fleishman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Nadezhda Popova, Haviva Reik, Edith Bruck, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Roza Robota, among others, still merit far more attention; their lives, too, should become part of the canon of Holocaust study. How is our understanding of the Shoah– and the central question of how it happened– impacted and re-conceptualized by knowing about the activities of female resisters and rescuers? This symposium will bring together international scholars working on this topic to share new approaches, projects and information on well-known women, as well as those whose stories remain shrouded in obscurity. Moreover, we will be hosting workshops and panels for teachers of all age groups, to enable them to carry this research, and the stories of these inspiring women, into their classrooms for transformative lessons on history, moral courage and upstander behavior.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS
Dr. Laura Morowitz is Professor of Art History at Wagner College, and Faculty Board Member of the Wagner College Holocaust Center. In 2012 she began teaching her course on Art and Aesthetics in the Third Reich and in 2019 she and Dr. Weintrob designed and curated the Center’s Education and Action Gallery. She is the author of three books and has published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of the History of Collections, The Journal of Popular Film and Television and Cultural Critique among other places. In 2011 she received a Hadassah Brandeis Research Institute Award for her work on a book dealing with Klimt’s confiscated Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In 2020 her article, “Ostmark as Bulwark, Hitler as Liberator and other Myths of the Anschluss” appeared in Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 29. She is currently at work on two manuscripts, Art, Exhibition and Erasure in Nazi Vienna, for which she was a awarded an NEH summer stipend in 2017 and a co-edited volume, with Dr. Megan Brandow-Faller, Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design, forthcoming from Routledge Press in 2023. She will be contributing the chapter on Art and the Holocaust to Sources for Studying the Holocaust:A Guide for Students, edited by Paul Bartrop.
Dr. Lori Weintrob is Professor of History and founding director of the Wagner College Holocaust Center, Staten Island, New York. She teaches Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and the Holocaust in Film, Theater and the Arts. Lori has connected Holocaust survivors with thousands of youth of all faiths in the tri-state area. She is co-editor of Beyond Bystanders: Educational Leadership for a Human Culture in a Globalizing Reality (2017) and Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (2012). She is co-author of the original play Rise Up: Young Holocaust Heroes. Recent presentations include “Thou Shalt not be a bystander: Holocaust Education for Empathy, Ethics and Courage,” at Kibbutzim College of Education and “Heroines of the Holocaust: Vitka Kempner-Kovner and Sara Ginaite” for the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She is currently editing Eyewitness to History: Documents of the Holocaust (ABC-CLIO Press) and completing a project on Zivia Lubetkin and other female resistance leaders. She has received awards for community-building and interfaith social justice activism, including with African-American and African Youth, the Albanian-Islamic Cultural Center and the Pride Center of Staten Island. She was fortunate to have studied the Holocaust with Saul Friedlander. Lori received her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
OUR ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Dr. Mehnaz Afridi is an Associate Professor of Religious studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. She teaches courses on Islam, the Holocaust, Genocide, and issues of gender within Islam. Her articles have appeared in books such as: Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur'an as Literature and Culture (Brill, 2006) and Not Your Father’s Anti-Semitism: Hatred of the Jews in the 21st Century (Paragon House, 2008). She is also author of “A Muslim’s Response to Frank H. Littel” in Legacy of an Impassioned Plea Franklin H. Littel’s Crucifixion of the Jews, Ed. David Patterson, (Paragon Press, 2018); “Muslim Memory and Righting Relations with the Other” in Righting Relations After the Holocaust, ed. Elena G. Procario-Foley and Robert A. Cathey (Paulist Press, 2018); and “The Role of Muslims and the Holocaust” in Oxford Handbooks Online, (Oxford, 2015). She is the co-editor of a book entitled: Orhan Pamuk and Global Literature: Existentialism and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her recent book Shoah through Muslim Eyes (Academic Studies Press, 2017) was been nominated for the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research and the Jacob Schnitzer Book Award. This year she was awarded the Costello Award for teaching excellence in the School of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College. Dr. Afridi obtained her Ph.D. from University of South Africa, her M.A. and B.A. from Syracuse University.
Dr.Judy Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, the Abraham and Edita Spiegel Family Professor in Holocaust Research, the Rabbi Pynchas Brener Professor in Research on the Holocaust of European Jewry, and Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry. Born in New York, she immigrated to Israel and completed her degrees at Bar-Ilan University (PhD History 1986). She directed the Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism (2009-11), the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism (2011-17), and the Helena and Paul Schulmann School for Basic Jewish Studies (2013-18), all at Bar-Ilan University. Since 2018 she has directed the Finkler Institute of Holocaust research. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about religious life during and after the Holocaust, gender and the Holocaust, Holocaust commemoration and public memory in the State of Israel.
Dr. Sharon Geva is a Lecturer at the Kibbutzim College and a teaching fellow in the NCJW Women and Gender Studies programme at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of the To the unknown sister: Holocaust heroines in Israeli society (Tel Aviv, 2010) [Hebrew]. Her recent publications include: “Ahead of Its Time: Ha'ishah Bamedinah, The story of a forgotten women's Journal in Israel”, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 34 (Spring 2019); “Case Closed: Women in the Israeli Police 1948–1958”, Israel Studies 24.1 (2019); “‘With and Despite the Burden of the Past’: 1946 in the Life Story of Zivia Lubetkin.” MORESHET Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, 14 (2017). In 2011 Dr. Geva launched the project, “Raising Value: Returning Women to History”.
Samantha Lakin, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a B.A., Magna Cum Laude, from Brandeis University. Lakin was a Fulbright scholar in Switzerland (2011-2012), where she researched the rescue of Jewish children to Switzerland during World War II. She has worked in Rwanda since 2013, researching local perspectives of memory and justice in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide that took place in the country. Lakin also researches civil society engagement in peace and justice, and gender-sensitive research, in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, and Northern Uganda. Lakin currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Survivors Fund (SURF), and the Advisory Board of the Genocide Survivors Support Network (GSSN). She has held positions at organizations including Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, Refugee Law Project, Never Again Rwanda, and the U.S. Embassy in Kigali. Heroines of Vichy France: Rescuing French Jews During the Holocaust, co-authored with Paul Bartrop, was published by Praeger in 2019
Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918. Mouradian has published articles on concentration camps, unarmed resistance, the aftermath of mass violence, midwifery in the Middle East, and approaches to teaching history. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review. Mouradian has taught courses on imperialism, mass violence, urban space and conflict in the Middle East, the aftermaths of war and mass violence, and human rights at Worcester State University, Clark University, Stockton University, Rutgers University, and California State University – Fresno.
Dr. Andrea Pető is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is author of 6 monographs, editor of 31 volumes, as well as 259 articles and chapters in books published in 21 languages. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including East European Politics and Society, Feminist Theory, NORA, Journal of Women’s History, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Clio, Baltic Worlds, European Politics and Society, International Women’s Studies Forum. In 2005, she was awarded the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the President of the Hungarian Republic and the Bolyai Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2018 she was awarded the All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She is author, with Ildikó Barna, of Political Justice in Budapest after WWII (2015) and co-editor, with Ayşe Gül Altınay, of Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversation on War, Genocide and Political Violence (2016) and edited the volume on War in the Interdisciplinary Handbook: Gender series (Macmillan, 2017
Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel is the founder and executive director of the Remember the Women Institute, a not-for-profit organization based in New York City that carries out and encourages research and cultural projects that integrate women into history, especially Holocaust history. She is the author or editor of six books on various aspects of the Holocaust, including Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp (Gefen Publishers, 2012), The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story (Syracuse University Press, 2007), and Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (co-edited with Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth, Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010). She has curated exhibits on women and the Holocaust and has written and lectured on the subject throughout the United States and internationally for more than 35 years.
Justina Smalkyté is a PhD candidate at the Center of History at Sciences Po where she is preparing a dissertation on anti-Nazi resistance movements in German-occupied Lithuania (1941-1944). She holds a double MA in European History from Paris Diderot University and Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in History from Vilnius University. Her doctoral research examines resistance through the lens of material culture: while focusing on a wide range of material objects used by anti-Nazi resistance members her thesis attempts to shed a new light on practices of resistance and violence in the Generalbezirk Litauen. She is also a teaching instructor for a BA course on the history of the 20th and 21st century empires at Sciences Po. Her research has been supported by research grants of the Sciences Po graduate school, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at Yad Vashem.