Current Projects

"We are All Witnesses": Eva Reichmann and Women in the Holocaust Archive

A history of a collection and the Jewish women and men who created it

I am currently writing a social history and archival biography of a collection of over one thousand survivor accounts recorded by The  Wiener Library and led by Eva Reichmann in the 1950s. Newly transformed into a digital archival repository, the collection provides a unique opportunity to examine the ideological impetus behind collecting efforts led by Reichmann and other Jewish refugees and survivors involved in the project, to recover continuities in postwar social networks among  survivors and refugees in Britain and abroad, and to examine the collection as a legacy of Reichmann's ideas about Jewish communal defense and memorialization after the Holocaust. It will explore the institutional priorities of the Library as well as the agency of the survivor participants. The book will center the role of women in postwar archives creation and draw out connections between them and the development of emerging narratives about
the Holocaust, exploring the relationship between personal and public memory. Finally, it will also explore how the digital archives of the Library extend and expand the original ideological underpinnings of the archive using technologies unforeseen by the creators. Some of my publications on this project include two blogs for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, a chapter titled, “‘We are all Witnesses’: Eva Reichmann and the Wiener Library’s Eyewitness Accounts Collection,” published in Agency and the Holocaust – Essays in Honor of Deborah Dwork (2020), and a chapter (co-authored with Ben Barkow) titled, "Early Holocaust Research, ‘Testimony’ and the Wiener Library" in Crimes Uncovered. The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers, edited by Hans-Christian Jasch, Stephan Lehnstaedt. Metropol, 2019.

Older Jews and the Holocaust

An edited volume, forthcoming with Wayne State University Press, 2026

This volume  focuses on the experiences of older Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. Elderly Jews were among the most vulnerable groups during the Holocaust, yet little scholarly and literary work has focused on their experiences. Not only were they often the first to be murdered by the Nazis but they were also less likely to survive the physical strains of persecution.  Editors Christine Schmidt, Elizabeth Anthony, and Joanna Sliwa and thirteen additional scholars center this marginalized group in historical research and counter other narratives in historiography and memory that only recount the devastation and despair associated with older age during the Holocaust. While these chapters explore how age and physical ability made older adults especially susceptible to violence and death, they also illuminate life and moments of agency within devastating circumstances. This volume is a powerful recovery of history and memory that expands our understanding of the Holocaust and the human experience during genocide.

Forthcoming with Wayne State University Press, Older Jews and the Holocaust has confirmed funding support for a subvention for open-access publication and for accompanying academic events from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (EVZ), the German Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) and the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation. For further information and to reserve your copy, visit this link.

Holocaust Letters: Methodology, Cases, and Reflections

An edited volume, forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2026

Throughout the Holocaust, letters were sent in their millions, in a variety of different contexts and for a range of differing purposes. Holocaust Letters marks the first volume of its kind to examine collectively letter writing during this period. The book presents different methodological approaches to letters as texts, material objects and markers of memory, and outlines a range of different case studies using letters as sources in practice. Emerging from the exhibition of the same name held at The Wiener Holocaust Library (UK), the authors in this volumeuse letters to gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and the post-war period in Western and Central Europe, and transnational humanitarian efforts in the UK and North Africa.
Holocaust Letters also presents a series of short source critiques of individual letters and small collections of letters, with insightful analysis of a variety of different types of letters to be found throughout. In whatever form they occur, Holocaust-era letters are witness not only to what happened and to whom but contain valuable evidence of how and, crucially, why the events that came to be known as the Holocaust occurred.

For further information and to reserve your copy, visit this link.