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Holocaust

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Irena Klepfisz

Irena Klepfisz is a poet whose legacy is key to the history of Jewish, American and lesbian literature. Klepfisz is also a pioneer of the recovery of Jewish and Yiddish women’s writing, to which she has dedicated translations, research, teaching, and activism.

Debra Renee Kaufman

Debra R. Kaufman has been a central voice in sociology, feminist studies, and Jewish Studies for over four decades. Her scholarship has spanned topics such as the role of women in Orthodox Judaism, post-Holocaust Jewish identity narratives, and contemporary American Jewish identity.

Miriam Katin

Miriam Katin is an award-winning comics artist best known for her Holocaust memoir We Are On Our Own. She was born in Hungary and now lives in New York City with her husband, Geoffrey Katin, a music educator.

Episode 56: The Light of Days: Judy Batalion (Transcript)

Episode 56: The Light of Days: Judy Batalion (Transcript)

Episode 56: The Light of Days: Judy Batalion

"They were women who carried cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear," says Judy Batalion, the author of The Light of Days, a new book about Jewish women resistance fighters in World War II who "blew up Nazi supply trains and shot and killed Gestapo men." She's also co-writing the screenplay for a Steven Spielberg movie based on the book. In this episode of Can We Talk?, we talk with Judy about what made some women well suited to certain roles in the resistance and why their stories aren't better known today.

Women and Sephardic Music

Ladino or Judeo-Spanish Sephardic songs are primarily a women’s repertoire. The two main traditions are that of northern Morocco and the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily today’s Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.

Jewish Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

The Jewish women who formed part of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were pivotal to the human rights movement in Argentina, fighting for truth and justice for victims of the 1976-1983 dictatorship that resulted in 30,000 disappeared, tortured, and killed.

Judy Cassab

Vienna-born, Budapest-trained painter Judy Cassab, a survivor of the Holocaust, arrived in Australia in 1951. She became one of the country’s best-known and best-loved artists, primarily for her portraits but also for her depictions of Australia’s bright interior.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is an American folklorist who is a scholar of Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe, North America, and Israel, museums, heritage, and tourism, as well as a curator of exhibits and documentarian. She is Chief Curator of the core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of Jewish history in Warsaw.

Flory Jagoda

Flory Jagoda is a singer, musician, and composer who has promulgated and enriched the Sephardic and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) musical and folkloric tradition in the United States. Born in 1923, in Sarajevo, Bosnia (formerly Yugoslavia), she managed to leave Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and avoid the sad fate of the extended family that nurtured her musical talent and Sephardic heritage. The popular Hanukah song, Ocho Kandelikas, is one of her many original compositions in Judeo-Spanish.

Twenty-First Century Jewish Literature by Women in the US

Twenty-first-century Jewish women’s writing in the United States is wide-ranging in genre and topic. In this body of literature, we can find insightful and nuanced stories of contemporary American life as well as fiction that delves into lost or forgotten Jewish histories. From a female Spinoza to a female golem, a strong feminist ethic is pervasive in these writings.

Photo of Birkenau ash pond, a single red flower growing at its bank.

Flowers At Auschwitz: The Power of Jewish Tradition and Hope

Dahlia Plotkin-Oren

The simple image of a flower growing in Auschwitz reminded me of the strength and power that hope can carry.

Louise Glück

Louise Glück, American poet, essayist, and educator, was the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as numerous other awards for her writing; she also served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. One finds the personal, the mythological, and the Biblical woven intricately throughout Glück’s oeuvre.

Promotional Image from "Harbor from the Holocaust"

Interview with "Harbor from the Holocaust" Co-Producer, Iris Samson

Ilana Diamant

JWA chats with Iris Samson, co-producer of Harbor from the Holocaust, a PBS documentary about Jewish refugees in Shanghai, China.

Topics: Holocaust
Reichstag building

Commemorating Tisha B’Av in Berlin

Paige Harouse

For Berlin Jews, Tisha B’Av means reconciling the city's brutal past with its hopeful present.

Leike Kogan

Lía Gilinski de Kogan, known as Leike Kogan (1911-2001), was a prominent activist in the Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF/ ICUF) and its women's movement (Organización Femenina del ICUF, OFI), linked to the Yiddish-speaking section of the Argentine Communist Party. She stood out as a leader and teacher in the schools belonging to this network.

Henny Wenkart, 2019

Keep Your Doors Open: Lessons from Henny Wenkart

Susan Goodman

We interview Holocaust survivor Henny Wenkart and reflect on how the US has closed its doors who those who need sanctuary most.

High school student standing in front of a brick wall. She is holding a protest sign that says "To forget a Holocaust is to be killed twice," attributed to Elie Wiesel.

On Emancipation Avenue

Madeline Canfield

My friend wanted to get arrested, one morning in July, on the curb of the sidewalk along a street east of downtown Houston.

Ilana Drake standing in a passageway on the Bell Tower of St. Paul's Church, Munich cityscape below.

Raising My Hand High

Ilana Drake

The teacher told us to raise our hands if we were Jewish. I didn’t know what to do.

Three figures, arms over shoulders, walking on a paved road. Guard towers lined alongside them.

Prayers in Majdanek

Isabel Hoffman

Last March, as I prepared to visit Holocaust sites as part of my high school semester in Israel, I braced myself.

Topics: Holocaust, Prayer
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will be For Me?

Hannah Kornblut

White Jews benefit from the system of white supremacy, and are often complicit, until their Jewish identity is revealed. 

Auschwitz

A New Take on the Holocaust Experience

Lily Drazin

In reading Ozick’s thoughtful insight about the double victimization women faced during World War II, I realized that my Holocaust education was indeed lacking.

Topics: Holocaust
Boer women and children in a British concentration camp during the Boer war

A Concentration Camp By Any Other Name

Roz Tromley

A concentration camp by any other name is still a concentration camp.

Episode 32: Silence Helps Others Forget

Host Nahanni Rous talks to Holocaust survivor and author, Irene Butter. Like Anne Frank's family, Butter’s fled Nazi Germany, settled in Amsterdam, and was eventually deported to concentration camps. Irene knew Anne Frank, and saw her at Bergen-Belsen just before Anne died. She tells us why she began sharing her story after more than four decades of silence, and how she sees her experience reflected in the current era of xenophobia and rising antisemitism.

Broad City Lost and Found

The Eight Best Jewish Quotes from Broad City’s “Lost and Found”

Larisa Klebe

A curated list of the eight best Jewish quotes from Season 5, Episode 6 of Broad City.

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