Debórah Dwork

Debórah Dwork is the Rose Professor of Holocaust History and the director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA. Her now-classic “Children with a Star” gave voice to the silenced children of the Holocaust; it was the first history of the daily lives of young people caught in the net of Nazism. It received international critical acclaim and was translated into German, Italian, Dutch and Japanese.

Dwork has received many academic and scholarly honors. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has also authored four books and co-authored three others with Robert Jan Van Pelt, professor at Waterloo University.

Her latest book entitled “Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946” examines the ever-dwindling choices open to asylum seekers, and the often painful decisions of the people who dealt with them – consuls, immigration officers and other government officials, church, health and social workers, volunteers and private individuals. Government policy and individual practice, and international action and local initiatives loomed large in this chapter of Holocaust history.

In addition to university lecturing, she is a guest teacher throughout the United States at every level of the American education system. Her book Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust serves as the cornerstone text for the national Holocaust education program of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous and is the text of choice in most college-level courses on the Holocaust.