Debórah Dwork

Debórah Dwork (* 1964 in New York City ) is an American historian specializing in the history of childhood and the Holocaust .

Debórah Dwork is the daughter of the mathematician Bernard Dwork and sister of the computer scientist Cynthia Dwork . She graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and Yale University with a master's degree in public health in 1978. She received her PhD from University College London in 1984 and was a post-doctoral student at Smithsonian Institution . Dwork became Assistant Professor (Public Health) at the University of Michigan in 1987 (where she was visiting professor in 1984), was Visiting Assistant Professor from 1989 and Associate Professor at the Yale University Child Study Center from 1991, and has been Rose Professor of Holocaust History since 1996 and founder and director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University , which she directed from 1996 to 2016.

Dwork began studying Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1890 and 1914 and then turned to childhood history. This also led her to the story of the Holocaust, which she treated, among other things, from the perspective of children and in books with Robert Jan van Pelt , including the everyday environment of perpetrators, local contemporaries and victims (including, for example, the architecture of the camps and embedded in the history of the persecution of the Jews). She worked a lot with oral history and posthumous documents from the victims. At the center she founded, she also deals with other genocides.

The book Auschwitz was the basis of a BBC series of the same name by Laurence Rees. The book received the National Jewish Book Award and the Spiro Kostoff Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.

In 1993/94 she was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Fonts

• Immigrant Jews on the Lower East Side of New York 1880-1914, in: Jonathan D. Sarna, American Jewish Experience. New York 1986
• "War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children". A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918. Tavistock Publ. London 1987
• Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. Yale University Press, New Haven 1991
  • German edition: Children with the yellow star. Europe 1933–1945. CH Beck, Munich 1994
• Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust. Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, New York 2002
• with Robert van Pelt: Holocaust. A history. Norton 2002
• with R. van Pelt Auschwitz: 1270 to the present. WW Norton, New York 1996, 2008
  • Auschwitz. From 1270 until today. Pendo, Zurich 1998
• The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow. University of Chicago Press 2008 (facsimile edition with commentary)
• with R. van Pelt: Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews 1933-1946. WW Norton, New York 2009
• Editing and commentary: A Boy in Terezin . The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944 – April 1945. Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2012

Web links

• Homepage