An Egregious Attack on Women’s Holocaust Scholarship

Gender studies aims to redress the alleged neglect of women (plus various sexual minorities including homosexuals and the “transgendered”) in scholarly disciplines across the alphabet from astronomy to history to zoology. It was only a matter of time before its zealous and accusatory gaze fell upon the study of the Holocaust, and now it has done so with a vengeance….

That feminist scholarship on the Holocaust is intended explicitly to serve the purposes of consciousness-raising— i.e., propaganda—is, as it happens, something its practitioners proudly admit…. Were they just a narrow cult living somewhere on a commune and insisting on a macabre sisterhood with the dead Jewish women of Europe, they could be safely ignored. Alas, however, just as Weitzman and Ofer assert, they represent “cutting-edge scholarship in an emerging field,” issuing a steady dribble of articles and books and increasingly assuming important positions in Holocaust museums, resource centers, and university enclaves. . . . If scholars who still study and teach about the Holocaust in a serious way were to speak up against [this scholarship],… we might yet begin to see a slow rotation of the wheel toward sanity and human decency.

—Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” (Commentary, June 1998)