April Virtual Speaker Series

Title: "The 'grey zone' for women who wore white: Jewish nursing identity during the National  Socialist regime"
Speaker: Jane Brooks
Date: April 2, 2025
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Cost: Free for members; $30 for non-members

Brief Abstract: Nursing may be highly feminised profession, built around vocation and self-sacrifice, but it is a respected and respectable profession. When women choose nursing as their work, they feel valued and valuable, both in the identity they place on themselves as a nurse and that which others place on them - their position in society.  Nevertheless, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the association of the profession with dirt and intimate body care, made nursing unattractive to Jewish women. As the National Socialist regime tightened its grip on the Jews of Germany and then elsewhere in Europe, Jewish women needed work and the community needed nurses.  For those Jewish women who then took up nursing, their nurse identity also enabled their survival and humanity. This talk explores the experience of Jewish nurses who engaged in nursing work in ghettos and camps. It exposes the multiple challenges they faced and the moral compromises they needed to make in order to support their co-religionists. 

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