ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: What made this work especially attractive to women?
Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Internationally renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field. One of the first historians to record Holocaust survivors’ oral histories and to use their narratives as a scholarly source, Dr. Dwork explores the social and cultural history of the Holocaust. She has approached the Holocaust from a completely different perspective from that of previous historians, for example, paying particular attention to victims’ primary documents and considering the experiences of children.
Dr. Dwork has won numerous awards for her work, including the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Holocaust Educational Foundation, the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Jewish Book Award, among others. She also sits on many advisory boards, but above all, Professor Dwork is a teacher and mentor, committed to training the next generation of Holocaust scholars.
Dwork’s latest work, Saints and Liars, is about Americans — Quakers, Unitarians, and Jews — who traveled abroad with faith-based agencies during World War II to aid and, little by little, turned to rescuing vulnerable individuals who were targeted by Nazi Germany and other racist states. Analyzing their daring initiatives, unpredictable and irrational factors come into focus: luck, impulse, sentiment, fortuitous circumstance, and timing. Zooming in on one city, one year, and one person or couple, each chapter offers a microhistory that yields a rich picture that would be lost in a larger frame.
