The article that I have chosen for this Weekly Writing looks at the portrayal of women in

the Holocaust. Specifically it analyzes how women are shown in the movies about the
Holocaust. Esther Fuchs finds that the majority of women portrayed in these movies are
passively portrayed and that the violence they encounter is indirect. She then goes on to list and
cite examples in movies where the women were portrayed in ways that are not true to history.
Most of the examples show women suffering not because the Nazis were aggressive towards
them, but rather the women suffered because their husbands, sons, and fathers were suffering the
direct violence of the Nazis. In one case a Jewish woman watched her husband get abducted by
the Nazis without getting abducted herself (she wasnt hiding either).
Often female characters are marginalized and stereotyped as sexual objects, or as
emotional reflectors. They are often ignorant of or indifferent to the political complexity and the
threat of the war. This article questions these stereotypes and the ideology that undergirds them.
This quotation sticks out to me because it seems like a great disservice to the victims of the
Holocaust for their suffering to be glossed over or erased by popular media. Most people are not
going to visit the Holocaust museum, they will not read books on the Holocaust, and they will
not read scholarly articles; but they will watch movies and see movies about the Holocaust. If
these movies are not historically accurate then we are offering people an incomplete image of
what really happened. The whole truth (or as close as we can get) ought to be shown in media
that tries to capture the whole truth. The women who suffered were not ignorant of the
consequences of war, nor were they solely emotional reflectors. These women were making
informed actions, and they suffered as victims to circumstances beyond their control just like
every other victim of the Holocaust.

While it is reasonable to argue that in World War II women and men endorsed
consciously or unconsciously a patriarchal ethos, it is also a fact that women (and children) were
not spared during the war. Women were sent to labor camps and concentration camps along with
the men, and women suffered the same humiliating treatment. Esther here is talking about how
women and children were victims of the same horrific treatment of the Nazis and were not
spared because they were women. This quotation and the testimonies of women survivors stand
in stark contrast to the rest of the articles examples. Women suffered at the hands of the Nazis
directly. They were raped, forced to work, removed from their families, and killed. Women
were not spared because they were women.
Joan Ringelheim notes that "Jewish women suffered both as Jews and as women from
anti-Semitism and sexism in their genocidal forms. More women were deported than men. More
women were killed than men."2 It is important to assess not only the factual load women carried
in the Holocaust, but also the way this load has been depicted in our commemorative cultural
scripts. It is here that this article ties most strongly into my topic. This article was published 10
years after intersectionality had been coined, and it is clearly mentioned here in the article.
Jewish women suffered both as Jews and as women. This specifically defines what I am
looking to explain and analyze, and it seems that this is what has been repeatedly overlooked in
media.

Works Cited
Fuchs, Esther. "Images of Women in Holocaust Films." Shofar Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (1999): 49-56. Print.