Debórah Dwork is renowned for scholarship dedicated to the history of the Holocaust that is both erudite and accessible, thanks to her lucid and eloquent writing. Her work and reputation as a mentor have attracted devoted students as advisees. With this festschrift, Dwork’s advisees honor her extraordinary scholarship, teaching, and two-decade tenure as inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Modern Jewish History and Culture as well as founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.
Debórah Dwork arrived at Clark in 1996, a historical moment that she grasped in all its complexity. The fall of communism signaled optimism about Europe’s future and the possibility of growing humanitarianism; it also promised potential access to vast unstudied archives.1 Yet, at the same time, genocide had returned to Europe with the conflict in Bosnia. At home, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) was newly established. These divergent developments led scholars such as her to wonder who would staff the State Department to address genocidal crises in conflict zones like Bosnia and Sudan, who would serve as curators to ensure the professional operation of the USHMM, who would plumb the archives documenting the Nazi onslaught on the Jews of Eastern Europe. At the same time, another serious issue loomed. Who would have the scholarly expertise to fight Holocaust and genocide denial once witnesses to these atrocities were gone? With the passing of survivors, Dwork was anxious to develop historians who would serve as a bridge between memory and scholarship.
While Holocaust historians were on the faculty at numerous universities at that time, there was no single institution within higher education whose explicit mission was to train doctoral students about the Holocaust and other genocides. A chance encounter on a bus furnished the opportunity to address this deficiency. In the early 1990s, Dwork advised an organization dedicated to aiding Christian rescuers that Rabbi Harold Schulweis founded as the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers (JFCR), which evolved into the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.2 Dwork traveled to Warsaw, Poland, in July 1993 for the conference, “Can Indifference Kill?” that the JFCR, then under the auspices of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), had sponsored.3 After the conference, participants had the opportunity to take a day trip to Auschwitz Birkenau. On the bus to Auschwitz, Dwork sat beside a man who posed a fateful question. “Where” he asked, “would someone go to get a PhD in Holocaust history?” Dwork’s seatmate, David Strassler, was Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Clark University (1992–1995), and the ADL representative to the Warsaw conference.
A small research university, dedicated at its founding to doctoral education, Clark was the perfect institution for the unique PhD program that David Strassler had in mind and Dwork would soon envision. Coincidentally, Worcester business leaders Sidney and Ralph Rose, with their wives Rosalie and Shirley, were already contemplating a professorship in memory of their father Philip whose large Jewish family had perished in Poland during the Holocaust. They readily agreed to endow the first-ever endowed professorship in Holocaust History at Clark University and, in 1996, Dwork accepted the Rose Professorship in Holocaust Studies and Jewish History and Culture. In 1998, David and Robert Strassler endowed a second professorship, the Strassler Family Chair in the Study of Holocaust History, and they gave a generous gift to endow the Strassler Center. The Roses established a library and graduate student fellowship funding. With these pieces in place, the first cohort of PhD students arrived at Clark in fall 1998. Clark University’s Department of History awarded the very first PhD degrees in Holocaust History five years later. A talented stream of students followed, many attracted by the prospect of working under Dwork’s direction.4
PhD alumni whom Dwork advised in the Strassler Center’s doctoral program contributed the essays in this volume on a theme that has preoccupied her throughout her teaching. “The Holocaust: Agency and Action” is the title of an enormously popular gateway course to the history of the Holocaust that Dwork taught on a regular basis during her twenty-year tenure. The subtitle captures the essence of Dwork’s view on the Holocaust. As the syllabus to this class explained, the “Holocaust was not a natural disaster,” like a “hurricane that blew in,” nor was it “predetermined” or “inevitable.” Instead, “people—individual people and people acting within the context of organizations and institutions—took decisions that, step by step, brought European society to murder. Others resisted. Looking at a range of people, from national leaders to army generals to local religious figures to student activists, to victims,” the course examined “the choices they confronted and the actions they took.”5
Agency, the choices individuals have, take or don’t take, the decisions and actions of individuals, and the consequence of these actions are the concepts that also drive Dwork’s unique contributions to Holocaust studies—her groundbreaking inquiries into the plight of children during the Holocaust; her landmark study of the history of Auschwitz—the place and the camp—from the Middle Ages to the present; her probably most impactful book (co-authored with Robert Jan van Pelt, as the previous and the following ones), the comprehensive account on the history of the Holocaust; and not least the panorama of the Jewish refugee experience during and after the Holocaust around the globe.
Born in April 1954 into a family of Jewish-American academics (her father, Bernard Dwork, was a professor of mathematics at Princeton University), Dwork earned a B.A. from Princeton University in 1975 and moved on to Yale University to earn an M.P.H. in 1978.6 In 1984, she concluded her training as a historian at the University College London with a dissertation on the infant and child welfare movement in England from the Boer War to the end of the Great War. It was the basis for her first book, published in 1987.7 Dwork’s interest in children would remain the focus of her academic work for many years, first on the faculty of the University of Michigan beginning in 1984 and then at Yale University’s Child Study Center in 1989. She shifted gears right after the publication of her first book and laid the ground for her second book, Children With A Star: Jewish Children in Nazi Europe, published in 1991 with Yale University Press, translated into many languages, and even the subject of a documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Company.8 This project broke ground and established Dwork’s transformative position in Holocaust history in three regards. First, by drawing attention to children as a particular group of victim of the Nazi assault on the Jews, whose plight had hitherto been analyzed mostly through the lens of adults. The survival rate of Jewish children, however, was much lower than that of adults because, for the Nazis, Jewish children were both useless and dangerous. Unlike adults, they could not be exploited as slave laborers. In addition, they were perceived as lethal threats, if not yet as children, then as grownups who would revenge the murder of their parents and, per the Nazi racial obsessions, further poison Aryan blood and weaken the German master race. Children With A Star illuminates the fate of these children with the deep sense of empathy that would shape her subsequent scholarship. The specter ranges from children in hiding, struggling with their Jewish identity to children who took action and took responsibility for feeding their families by smuggling food into the ghettos. This panorama of human agency in the midst of genocide relied in major parts on a source that Holocaust history had long been reluctant to operationalize—oral history, interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. Dwork had conducted them since the mid-1980s, well aware that the survivor interviews are often the only source we have to reconstruct the subjective dimension of the world of the victims of the Holocaust, and of the destruction of this world. Embracing their authenticity, she pioneered their profound utilization. Written by one of the very few early women historians, Children With A Star was, thirdly, one of the first monographs that demonstrated the usefulness of the category of gender at a time when this was heavily debated and senior scholars of the field, typically male ones, suspected that a gendered approach might distract from the common suffering of Jewish men and women from Nazi persecution.9 Dwork’s work, by contrast, contributed to the now established consensus that the intensity of this suffering can be accounted for only by great sensitivity toward social, cultural, and emotional difference, with gender being the foremost category to capture such variety.
Years before she came to Clark, Dwork entered a prolific period of scholarly work carried out in collaboration with Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor of cultural history at the University of Waterloo since 1987. The first publication in a series of three tremendously impactful monographs was the 1996 inquiry into the history of Auschwitz that won, among others, the National Jewish Book Award.10 Auschwitz reveals how a small Polish town, founded in the thirteenth century and for centuries home to a strong Jewish community, transformed under Nazi rule to epitomize the Third Reich’s “industrial” genocide. Long before the “spatial turn”11 found its way into Holocaust studies, Dwork and van Pelt embedded the meaning of architecture and geography for the Nazi machinery of death into a long-term analysis of ideologies, policies, and politics of territorial expansion and the symbolism of places. Auschwitz doesn’t start in 1940 but in the Middle Ages and with a retrospective on the nineteenth-century German obsession with Lebensraum, or living space, in the East. It ends with a subtle analysis of the Polish efforts to “appropriate” Auschwitz as a symbol of Polish, not Jewish, martyrdom, a struggle whose recent radicalization in Polish memory politics could not have been anticipated when the book was published.
The second piece to emerge from the Dwork and van Pelt Holocaust trilogy was researched and written when Dwork had already assumed her directorsh...