Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

by Myrna Goldenberg (Editor), Amy Shapiro (Editor)

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."

Genres: Nonfiction, History

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 2013

Reviews

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of essays provides, in the first part, a look at the different treatment women received as female as opposed to men. While both genders were denigrated, women faced a different and more torturous abuse. In the second part of the book are essays dealing more with what could be called PTSD. One of the essays deals with the 'kindertransport' where parents voluntarily separated themselves from their children for the children's safety. However, the traumatic stress incurred by the children (as well as the parents) could be indicative of the psychological issues being caused by the Trump administration with it policy of separating immigrant children from their families.

[Meli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommend. Presents new perspectives on Holocaust studies that are seldom considered, yet paramount to a holistic understanding of its history. I used this as a source for my college paper on women's experience of the Holocaust, a review of it through a gendered narrative, and the Nazi aggression against the woman through the control of her sexual agency and the stripping of her identities as a woman, mother, and ultimately, a person (to simplify the description...)

"if the crime of the Jew is being alive, then the most heinous of criminals is the Jewish mother…the assault on the Jewish mother is an extension of a broader assault on the feminine"

Would recommend.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gender studies, women and the Holocaust. Thought provoking.