Hearing Women’s Voices From the Shoah

Beginning with a performance of an excerpt of the play, Etty, adapted from the diaries of Dutch writer, Etty Hillesum and a look together at excerpts from Hillesum’s and other testimonies, we can begin to uncover what women experienced under German occupation. Join us to think about how gender, age and family context shaped women’s lives in flight, ghettos, concentration and death camps and in hiding. Our conversation will include talking about the process of performing Etty before so many different audiences, including high security prisons, and people disconnected from Holocaust history.

Ansche Chesed member, Susan Stein is an actor, playwright and teaching artist in NYC. Stein has spent the past eight years touring her original play, Etty, directed by Austin Pendleton, to theaters, universities, schools and prisons throughout the United States, UK, parts of Europe and Israel. Stein studied acting at NYU Graduate School and SUNY Purchase.

Ansche Chesed member Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German 2012, George L. Mosse Prize of the AHA and Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library); Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995) and recent co-edited volumes, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017, with M. Edele and S. Fitzpatrick) and The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (2019, with A. Patt, L. Levi, M. Mandel). She is working (with Dorota Glowacka) on Gender and the Holocaust (text for teaching, Bloomsbury) and her current research focuses on “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees in the Soviet Union, Iran, and India” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.