Different Horrors, Same Hell

Different Horrors, Same Hell brings together a variety of essays demonstrating the breadth of contributions that feminist theory and gender analysis make to the study of the Holocaust. The collection provides new perspectives on central works of Holocaust scholarship and representation, from the books of Hannah Arendt and Ruth Klüger to films such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Interviews with survivors and their descendants draw new attention to the significance of women's roles and family structures during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and interviews and archival research reveal the undercurrents of sexual violence within the Final Solution. As Doris Bergen shows in the book's first chapter, the focus on women's and gender issues in this collection "complicates familiar and outworn categories, and humanizes the past in powerful ways."

Myrna Goldenberg is professor emerita, Montgomery College, Maryland, and founding director of the Paul Peck Humanities Institute at Montgomery. Amy Shapiro is professor of philosophy and humanities at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Other contributors include Karen Baldner, Doris Bergen, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Britta Frede-Wenger, Mary J. Gallant, Gaby R. Glassman, Dorota Glowacka, Bjšrn Krondorfer, Rochelle L. Millen, and David Patterson.

Foreword by Elizabeth Minnich

Introduction

Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro

Part I. History of Feminist Theory and Gender: Analysis of the Holocaust

1 What Do Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Contribute to Understanding the Holocaust?

Doris L. Bergen

2 Philosophy in the Feminine and the Holocaust Witness: Hannah Arendt and Sarah Kofman 38

Dorota Glowacka

3 Simone Weil: A French-Jewish Intellectual Journey in the 1930s and 1940s

Rochelle L. Millen

4 Patriarchy, Objectification, and Violence against Women in Schindler’s List and Angry Harvest

Amy H. Shapiro

5 Sex-Based Violence and the Politics and Ethics of Survival

Myrna Goldenberg

Part II . Practice of Feminist Theory and Gender: Analysis of the Holocaust

6 From Pulp to Palimpsest: Witnessing and Re-Imagining through the Arts

Björn Krondorfer in collaboration with Karen Baldner

7 The Nazi Assault on the Jewish Soul through the Murder of the Jewish Mother

David Patterson

8 Wiedervereiningung Ersehend: Gender and the Holocaust Fate of the Müller and Gittler Families

Suzanne Brown-Fleming

9 The Kindertransport: Gender and the Rescue of Jewish Children 1938–39

Mary J. Gallant

10 Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters: The Hidden Legacy of the Holocaust

Gaby R. Glassman

11 Talking to Ruth Klüger

Britta Frede-Wenger

Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index