Teaching Sexualized Violence Against Jewish Women during the Shoah: New Perspectives through Visual, Spatial, and Testimonial Analysis

The study of sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust (Shoah) is well-documented, thorough, and accessible to the public. However, this subject is absent from many high school and college curricular resources available to educators. To bridge the gap between what historians know and educators teach, this thesis presents an overview of existing scholarship and curricular resources on sexual violence during the Shoah. It also provides a GIS- based digital tool to facilitate discussion in high school and college classrooms. This tool draws upon resources in the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The research presented here offers a more detailed analysis of particular testimonies than has been done in existing scholarship. The digital project that composes one component of this thesis is a map tool that helps the user visualize the scale of sexual assault against Jewish women during the Shoah, while also bringing users to the precise point in each testimony where each woman shares her experience with sexual violence. In mapping incidents of sexual violence, the map identifies certain patterns of sexual violence during the Shoah. These include acts of sexual violence in ghettos, on transportation, in hiding, and in concentration camps. In addition, it calls attention to the widespread prevalence of sexual assault by Soviet forces during liberation. Teaching students about sexualized violence during the Shoah at appropriate grade levels will work towards breaking the silences that exist both in the classroom and in the archive.