The book "Her Story, My Story? Writing about Women and the Holocaust, is composed of 27 biographical-academic essays written by prominent women scholars worldwide. All have devoted a significant part of their professional lives to writing about aspects of Jewish women's experiences during the Holocaust. We believe that this choice was not random, and in many cases was rooted in the personal history and professional experiences of each scholar which later affected the fruits of her scholarship.
Each essay charts that scholar's journey towards working on the topic and her experiences while conducting her research. Scholars discuss issues relating to identity, personal choices, religious, political and cultural affiliations and their connection to the focus of their research.
About the Author: Prof. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to Gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, Memory, State of Israel, The United States, and Commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell 1998), The Bergson Boys and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (Syracuse UP 2005), Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the making of Collective Israeli Memory (University Press of Wisconsin, 2010), Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938-1945 (Purdue University Press, 2012), Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women, (Peter Lang, 2013), and My Name is Freida Sima: The American-Jewish Women's Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina (Peter Lang, 2017), A Very Special Life: The Bernice Chroncles (Peter Lang, 2018).
Prof. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of numerous books and articles and specializes in topics pertaining to Gender, Jewish religious life, the Holocaust, Memory, State of Israel, The United States, and Commemoration. Among her books are Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (Vallentine Mitchell 1998), The Bergson Boys and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy (Syracuse UP 2005), Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the making of Collective Israeli Memory (University Press of Wisconsin, 2010), Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938-1945 (Purdue University Press, 2012), Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women, (Peter Lang, 2013), and My Name is Freida Sima: The American-Jewish Women's Immigrant Experience Through the Eyes of a Young Girl from the Bukovina (Peter Lang, 2017), A Very Special Life: The Bernice Chroncles (Peter Lang, 2018).
Prof. Dalia Ofer is Max and Rita Haber Professor of Holocaust and East European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (emerita). She received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies, from the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (2018).
Prof. Ofer directed the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry (2003-2007) and the Vidal Sassoon International Research Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (1995-2002). She was a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Brandies, the U. of Maryland and the U. of Sidney Australia, and a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow at the CAHS-USHMM.
She has published extensively on the Holocaust, Holocaust memory, and Immigration to Israel. Among her books are Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel (Yad Ben Zvi, 1990; Eng. Oxford University Press, 1998), and co-edited (with Lenore J. Weitzman), Women in the Holocaust (Yale U.P., 1999). She is the academic editor (with Paula Hyman) of Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (available on the Jewish Women's Archive site), co-editor with Françoise S. Ouzan and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz of Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities (Berghahn, 2012), and editor of Israel in the Eyes of the Survivors (Heb., Yad Vashem, 2014), The History of the Jewish Police in the Viliampole (Kovno) Ghetto, (Heb., Yad Vashem, 2016) and Children in the Holocaust and its Aftermath: Historical and Psychological Studies of the Kestenberg Archive (with Sharon Kangisser Cohen and Eva Fogelman) (Berghahn, 2017).
