Award-winning Holocaust historian Marion Kaplan will discuss the emergence of Holocaust research into gender issues in the 1980s. She will reflect on how far the field has come since her groundbreaking work in 1998, and how it has reshaped our understanding of how victims and survivors experienced Nazi rule. Although there is still much work to be done to uncover the ways gender shaped life and death during World War II, by looking at gender we can enhance our understanding of the Holocaust and its lessons for the present and future.

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991), Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998), and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore, 2011). She has edited several other books on German-Jewish and women’s history and has taught courses on German-Jewish history, European women’s history, German and European history, as well as European Jewish history, and Jewish women’s history. Her newest book, Jewish Refugees Fleeing Hitler: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45 will be published by Yale University Press in 2019.

Co-sponsored by the Department of German and Russian Studies, the
Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Arnold Nemirow Holocaust Education Fund.