People
International Advisory Board

Debórah Dwork

Debórah Dwork, Ph.D, is an historian of the Holocaust and the founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. Renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she changed the academic landscape, envisioning and actualizing the first doctoral program in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. Recipient of the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020), Dr. Dwork has served as a Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. She is currently on the U.S. delegation to the 34-member state International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. One of the first historians to record Holocaust survivors' oral histories and to use their narratives as a scholarly source, Dr. Dwork’s body of work explores the social and cultural history of the Holocaust. Her award-winning books include: Children With a Star, which introduced a child-centered lens to historical investigation; Flight from the Reich (co-authored with Robert Jan van Pelt) which focused on the experiences of refugee Jews from 1933 into the postwar era; Auschwitz (co-authored with Pelt), which drew the important connection between industrial killing and social perceptions of constructive activity; and Holocaust: A History (co-authored with Pelt), which looks at the Holocaust in the context of the history of Europe. Speaking to the crucial importance of Holocaust scholarship within the field of genocide and atrocity prevention, Dwork said:

It is incumbent upon us as scholars to lay bare the underlying structures that gave rise to murder, and to analyze the responses of surrounding populations and of the victims themselves. AIPG is dedicated to applying that knowledge to develop and enact measures to prevent mass violence. I am honored to participate in that urgent endeavor as a member of the Advisory Board.

People
Interview