Looking back on the past four decades of historical studies on Jewish women and the Holocaust is no small task. I started my lown research in the 1970s, focusing first on the German Jewish feminist movement, the Jüdischer Frauenbund, and later on women's roles in Jewish families in late nineteenth-century Germany. My interest stemmed from my family's refugee history and from my engagement with the women's movement as a student. But it took a while for me to gain the courage to address Jewish women and families in Nazi Germany. It felt too close. Still, as with my other scholarship, I wondered, "Might women have experienced this era differently from men? And if so, how?"

Early Questions about Women and the Holocaust (1983-2000)

The early American scholars of women and the Holocaust assumed that the answer to these questions was yes, but we needed to do the research. I will start there, but first, a historical reminder: 1980s feminists may have propagated this agenda, but we did not know that questions about gender arose long before. Polish Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum's collection of testimonies, reports, and surveys in the Warsaw ghetto from 1939 until 1943, later known as the Oyneg Shabes project, asked questions of and about women, and many women participated in this undertaking. Philip Friedman, a Polish Jewish historian who survived Lvov in hiding, set a gendered agenda for future research (later published in English as Pathways to Extinction, 1980) as early as 1945.1

Kaplan, Marion. "Did gender matter during the Holocaust?." Jewish Social Studies 24.2 (2019): 37-56.

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