Description

“This moving and informative anthology helps us grasp for the first time what Jewish women endured, both as Jews and as women.”—Elie Wiesel

“A timely answer to a timely question.”—Raul Hilberg, author, The Destruction of the European Jews

“[Different Voices] is a powerful and shattering account—via personal testimony, reflections, and interpretive essays—of women’s experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath.”—Nancy Goldberger, coauthor, Women’s Ways of Knowing

“An extraordinary anthology. . . this is a fascinating and important contribution to women’s studies and Jewish studies.”—Susannah Heschel, editor, On Being A Jewish Feminist

Different Voices is the most thoroughgoing examination of women’s experiences of the Holocaust ever compiled. It gathers together—for the first time in a single volume—the latest insights of scholars, the powerful testimony of survivors, and the eloquent reflections of writers, theologians, and philosophers.

Part One, “Voices of Experience,” recounts the painful and poignant stories of survivors, stories of resistance, compliance, medical experiments, all kinds of horror, and total vulnerability. Part Two, “Voices of Interpretation,” offers the new insights of women scholars of the Holocaust, including evidence that the Nazis specifically preyed on women as the propagators of the Jewish race. In Part Three, “Voices of Reflection,” women artists and intellectuals contemplate the Holocaust, even to the point of suggesting, through painstaking statistical evidence, that more Jewish women than Jewish men actually perished in the Holocaust.

Lyrical, vivid, and affecting, Different Voices is a powerful commemoration of the sufferings and of the courage of Jewish women during the darkest years of the twentieth century. It is a compelling—and essential—contribution to our knowledge of the Holocaust.