Debórah Dwork is an American historian, specializing in the history of theHolocaust. She is the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and formerly served as the Rose Professor of Holocaust History atClark University inWorcester,Massachusetts.^[1]

Dwork earned a B.A. fromPrinceton University in 1975, an M.P.H. fromYale University in 1978, and a Ph.D. fromUniversity College London in 1984. After postdoctoral studies at theSmithsonian Institution, she joined the faculty of theUniversity of Michigan in 1984, and moved to theYale Child Study Center at Yale University in 1989. She took her current position as Rose Professor at Clark University in 1996. She has held fellowships from theGuggenheim Foundation, theAmerican Council of Learned Societies, and theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,^[2] and has served as the Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University.^[3]

Dwork is the founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, and a delegate to theInternational Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.^[1]

In her first book,War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children (1987), Dwork examined questions about the family, the role of women, and the concept of children's rights in the context of the development of the modern welfare system.^[4]

Dwork moved from thehistory of childhood as a social construct to the history of children as subjects and actors. Her historical analysis used children's experiences as a lens through which to view all of society. In herChildren With A Star (1991), she presented the daily lives of young people caught in the net of Nazism.^[5] The book became the subject of a documentary of the same name by theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation.^[6]

Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present (1996), co-authored withRobert Jan van Pelt, demonstrated the connection between industrial killing and the daily functions of a society that believed it was involved in constructive activity. The book uses architectural evidence to understand Auschwitz.^[7] The book received theNational Jewish Book Award^[8] and theSpiro Kostof Award.^[9]

Dwork's bookVoices and Views: A History of the Holocaust (2002) is an edited, annotated, and illustrated collection used by the national Holocaust education program of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.^[10]Dwork and van Pelt also collaborated onHolocaust: A History, which discusses the place of the Holocaust in the overall history of Europe, from the Middle Ages to the middle of the twentieth century. It explores how the different occupation regimes shaped the local populations' ability to respond to the genocide enacted outside their windows. It integrates the history of World War II and the history of the Holocaust.^[11]

InFlight from the Reich (2009), Dwork and van Pelt turned their attention to the question ofrefugee Jews from 1933 through the postwar period.^[12]

Dwork edited and annotatedThe Terezin Album of Mariaka Zadikow (2008), aposie album collected by a Jewish inmate as the Germans pushed forward with deportations fromTheresienstadt.^[13] InA Boy in Terezin: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944 – April 1945 (2011), she returned to the experiences of children as an important source for contemporaneous accounts of Jewish life under Nazi persecution.^[14]

Dwork is the daughter of mathematicianBernard Dwork,^[15] and sister of computer scientistCynthia Dwork.

Dwork has served as the historian of record on and off film in feature-length and TV documentaries. These include director Rick Trank's "Against the Tide" (2008) and "Unlikely Heroes" (2003),^{[citation needed]} and the Ken Burns/Artemis Joukowsky documentary, "Defying the Nazis" (2016).^[16] Television documentaries include "Hiding in Plain Sight" (CBS, 2009) and "Misha Defonseca and her Hoax Memoir," (RTBF, Belgian National TV, 2008).

• Dwork, Debórah (2012).A Boy in Terezin: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944 – April 1945. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.ISBN 978-0-8101-2779-1.^[14]
• Dwork, Debórah; van Pelt, Robert (2009).Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946. New York: W.W. Norton.ISBN 978-0-393-06229-8.^[12] Translations: Dutch (Elmar); French (Calmann-Lévy).
• Dwork, Debórah (2008).The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.ISBN 978-0-226-51186-3.^[13]
• Dwork, Debórah; van Pelt, Robert (2008).Auschwitz. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.ISBN 978-0-393-32291-0. First published as:Auschwitz 1270 to the Present. New York: Norton.ISBN 0-393-03933-1.^[7] Translations: Czech (Argo); Dutch (Boom); German (Pendo); Polish (Swiat Ksiazki).
• Dwork, Debórah; van Pelt, Robert (2002).Holocaust: A History. New York: Norton.ISBN 0-393-05188-9.^[11] Translations: Dutch (Boom); Portuguese (Imago); Spanish (EDAF).
• Dwork, Debórah (2002).Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust. New York: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous.ISBN 0-9700602-0-3.^[10]
• Dwork, Debórah (1991).Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.ISBN 0-300-05054-2.^[5] Translations: Dutch (Boom); German (Beck); Italian (Marsilio); Japanese (Sogen Sha).
• Dwork, Debórah (1987).War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England 1898–1918. London; New York: Tavistock Publications.ISBN 0-422-60660-X.^[4]

• Debórah DworkArchived 2013-02-09 at theWayback Machine Academic homepage.
• Debórah Dwork Personal homepage.
• Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Homepage.

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