Double jeopardy: being Jewish and female in the Holocaust

The philosopher Joan Ringelheim has remarked that genocide is an equal opportunity victimizer and, in fact, that “every Jew was equally a victim in the genocide of the Holocaust.” Indeed, Nazi policy marked every Jew for murder, but Nazi practice differentiated men and women in most phases of the Holocaust. Yet, for decades, the Holocaust was known through the experiences of men. Their experiences became the Jewish experience. Obviously, men’s experiences are true for men-but not necessarily, and in some aspects not at all, true for women-for example, the issues of menstruation, rape, pregnancy, and childbirth. Undoubtedly some men were raped, but, for sure, no man was pregnant. As a partial response to critics who claim that the study of women and the Holocaust trivializes the subject, John Roth argued that it is through the particularities of the victims that we develop a reliable knowledge base about this genocide.The fact is that women faced a double jeopardy: First, they were targeted for death because they were Jews; second, they suffered, and those who survived often attribute their survival in large part to behaviours they learned, as women