By Joan Ringelheim
Companions: The Strange and the Familiar offers insights into Joan Ringelheim’s pioneering work on women and the Holocaust.
Only one chapter of Companions: The Strange and the Familiar (Outskirts Press, 2021) by Joan Ringelheim deals with her work on women and the Holocaust, and the rest tell us other details about her life.
Dr. Joan Ringelheim, who died in October 2021, was a pioneer, perhaps THE pioneer, regarding studying women’s experiences during the Holocaust. Along with Dr. Esther Katz, in 1983 she organized the first conference on women and the Holocaust. She always said she was writing a book about her experience, and such a book finally was published months before her death from cancer. A philosopher by training, she realized that the book she had long planned to write needed to blend her life experiences with an intellectual approach. The result is a book of six essays that cover the parts of her life that were crucial to her struggles to meet the strange and the familiar: music and the piano, teaching, women and the Holocaust, oral history, a trip to war-torn Sarajevo, and breast cancer.