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Dr. Pnina Rosenberg

Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellow
"Yiddish Culture in the French Occupied Zone Camps (1941-1944)"

Professional Background

Dr. Pnina Rosenberg received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Haifa, and an M.A. in the history of art and a B.A. in comparative literature from Tel Aviv University. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was an art curator at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Western Galilee, Israel, and History of Art Lecturer at Oranim-Academic College in Tiveon, Israel. For her Research Fellowship of the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance, Ms. Rosenberg conducted research for her project, “Yiddish Culture in the French Occupied Zone Camps (1941-1944).”

Dr. Rosenberg is the author of L’art des indésirables: l’art visuel dans les camps français (L’Harmattan, 2003). She has also published several scholarly articles, including “Art of the Holocaust” in The Last Expression (1999); “Women-Artists in Auschwitz” in The Last Expression (2002); and “Mickey Mouse in Gurs: Graphic Novels in a French Internment Camp” in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (2002). She is fluent in Hebrew, English, French, Yiddish, Portuguese and has a high command of Italian.

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Museum, Dr. Rosenberg studied the cultural corpus produced in the camps in the Occupied Zone in France. Many studies have been published on the camps themselves, but Dr. Rosenberg carried out the first comprehensive study on the cultural and spiritual life of the Jewish internees in the camps of the Occupied Zone through their artistic works, which kept alive the life and culture of pre-war France. Dr. Rosenberg utilized the Museum’s many archives, including those pertaining to the Jewish community and its organizations in France; records from camps such as Drancy, Pithiveirs, and Beaune-la-Rolande; the archives of David Diamant; the records of the Union Gènèral des Israélites de France; and the archives of the Gestapo in France.

Dr. Rosenberg was in residence at the Mandel Center from July 15 to September 15, 2003.