Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

by Sebastian Junger

But women are more likely than men to display something called moral courage. The Righteous Among the Nations is an award given to non-Jews who helped save Jewish lives during the Holocaust and by its very nature selects for people who have a deep moral conviction about right and wrong. In Poland, the Netherlands, and France, providing refuge to Jews who were trying to evade the German authorities was a crime punishable by death, and while the decision to do so didn’t require the same kind of muscular action that men excel at, it could be just as deadly. There are more than 20,000 names in the Righteous Among the Nations records, and an analysis conducted in 2004 found that if married couples are excluded, women slightly outnumber men in the list of people who risked their lives to help Jews. The greater empathic concern women demonstrate for others may lead them to take positions on moral or social issues that men are less likely to concern themselves with. Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows