Women Defying Hitler: Rescue and Resistance under the Nazis

Description

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.

Nathan Stoltzfus is Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies and of History at Florida State University, USA. He is the author of Hitler's Compromises (2016) and Resistance of the Heart (1996), which was a co-recipient of the Institute of Contemporary History's Fraenkel Prize. Mordecai Paldiel is Adjunct Professor in Jewish History at Yeshiva University, USA. He is the author of several books, including Saving One's Own (2017) and The Righteous Among the Nations (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 many books including Double Jeopardy (1998), Perfect Heroes (2010), and Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women (2013).

Women Defying Hitler is a thorough volume that tackles the historiographical imbalance against women's rescue activities and provides guidance for how we can remember these sacrifices and apply them to the modern day. * Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire * A major contribution to Holocaust studies, Women Defying Hitler: Rescue and Resistance under the Nazis brings together leading international scholars to illuminate the myriad of different roles played by women in resisting Nazism. It will be invaluable for scholars and essential reading for anyone interested in war, women's history, and the increasingly important field of feminist studies of the Holocaust. * Zoe Waxman, Lecturer in Modern Jewish History, University of Oxford, UK * 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. * Eric Langenbacher, Teaching Professor of Government, Georgetown University, USA *