Day 568: Prof. Manuela Consonni on how women resisted the Nazis

The Times of Israel Daily Briefing

The Times of Israel

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4.4 • 864 Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring key issues currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World, with host Amanda Borschel-Dan speaking with Prof. Manuela Consonni, director of Hebrew University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

Consonni, a leading scholar of Holocaust memory, gender, and post-war European culture, decided to mark Yom Hashoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, with an exhibition at the Mount Scopus campus called, "Faces of Women's Resistance."

The exhibition looks at how women -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- resisted the Nazi regime. Like men, many were fighters, partisans and rescuers, but also the sheer survival of their family was put on the shoulders of many mothers.

We discuss definitions of resistance and what means were available to women during the Nazi regime.

And finally, we delve into the use of Holocaust language when discussing the hostages kept by Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

So this week, we ask Prof. Manuela Consonni, what matters now?

What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.

IMAGE: Two young women who managed to survive over a year in the concentration camp at Belsen, Germany, are shown, April 30, 1945. (AP Photo)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Times of Israel's What Matters now.
0:05.7	I'm your host deputy editor Amanda Borschel Dan here with Professor Manuela Konsoni,
0:11.0	who is a leading scholar of Holocaust history, memory, gender, and post-war European culture.
0:18.1	She is currently the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the
0:21.9	study of anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University. And we are here to speak for Yom Ha Shoa, the Israeli
0:29.6	Holocaust Memorial Day, about a new exhibition that is going up at the Hebrew University.
0:36.2	So Manuela, thank you so much for joining me today.
0:38.9	Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, And it is such a pleasure. And as I said, we're going to
0:44.4	speak on Yomashoa about the new exhibit, The Faces of Women's Resistance in the Holocaust,
0:49.9	and we'll hear all about that and more when we're back.
1:00.0	Thank you. And we'll hear all about that and more when we're back. Tolkien's trilogy was a perfect book to send to a POW.
1:05.5	Very well-defined good and evil.
1:08.7	And it was a great escape from the physical environment that we were in.
1:13.6	It's November 16, 1973, and we're at the military section of the Lode Airport.
1:19.0	A red and white, DC-6 passenger plane lands, and out of it comes a stream of young men.
1:24.8	Ten men known collectively as Shvuyay Milchemeta Atasha, the POWs of the War of Attrition.
1:31.9	All of them had been held, most of the time together, in an Egyptian prison for more than three
1:36.9	and a half years. So it was very much a kibbutz. I want to draw your attention to a small,
1:43.5	tattered bag, Menachem Eini is holding.
1:46.0	That brown knapsack actually held a treasure.
1:49.0	A manuscript that would make these men in their unlikely story momentarily famous.
1:54.0	It was the fruit of their communal work during the years in which they were held in one of Egypt's most notorious dungeons.
	...

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