Ms. Hana G. Green

Professional Background

Hana Green is a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She has also received her master’s degree in Holocaust studies from the University of Haifa and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Florida. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ms. Green was a middle school social studies and language arts teacher and Teach for America corps member. In addition to her academic work, Green is a contributor to the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, a volunteer transcriptionist for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s Oral History Project, and serves on the organizational team for the 26th Workshop on the History and Memory of National Socialist Camps and Killing Sites to be held in Łódź, Poland in September 2023.

Ms. Green has been awarded several fellowships and research grants, including a Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) Graduate Studies Fellowship, a Fritz Halbers Fellowship Award from the Leo Baeck Institute, an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship, a one-year DAAD research grant, and research awards from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Tauber Institute.

Ms. Green’s research draws on a diverse collection of sources, including survivor testimonies and Nazi administrative records, and investigates the day-to-day life of Jews who passed during the Nazi period, underscoring critical themes such as movement, gender, luck, and the development of social networks. She uses sources in English, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew.

Fellowship Research

Ms. Green was awarded the Sosland Foundation Fellowship to conduct research for her dissertation, “‘Whatever happens, never reveal to anyone that you’re Jewish’: Identity Passing as a Jewish Response to Persecution during the Nazi Period.” This project examines the phenomenon of Jewish identity passing responses from the dawn of Nazism through the months following its demise. During her time at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Green will study primary source documents aiming to trace the ways that Jews developed and employed passing strategies in response to ever-worsening social conditions and carried them into, through, and beyond wartime persecution. She also applies a gendered approach to her research and scrutinizes the ways that gender impacted passers’ experiences of victimhood and survivorship.

This fellowship allows Ms. Green access to the immense archival holdings at the USHMM and will enable the collection and integration of essential and previously unused primary source material for her dissertation. Situated at the intersection of Holocaust history, gender studies, and identity studies, Ms. Green’s dissertation seeks to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of Jewish identity passing as a persecution response and to establish passing as a key area of study for Holocaust research.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023—May 31, 2024