Webinar | Jewish Women Fighters: Herstories of Resistance – Messages and Strategies for Today

Zuzanna Hertzberg, drawing on her over ten-year research and artistic project, "Mechitza: Individual and Collective Women's Resistance during the Holocaust" and "Jewish Anarchists Against Hegemony," recovers and retells the long history of armed resistance by Jewish women, which began before World War II with anarchist groups in the late 19th century and the anti-fascist International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Recovering the herstories of Jewish women from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia, she demonstrates the models of resistance undertaken by women during the Holocaust. How did they acquire the skills to fight oppression? How can their resistance strategies be applied to the social activities and struggles we engage in today? How can we bring the archive to the streets and give it new life? You will hear all about this during the meeting.

Zuzanna Hertzberg is an interdisciplinary artist, artivist, and researcher. Her artistic practice encompasses painting, textiles, and artivist activities in public spaces. She creates installations and collages using archival resources, accompanied by spoken performances. Her artistic practice explores the intertwining of individual and collective memory. She focuses on issues related to the marginalization of minority groups and the policy of erasing uncomfortable narratives—especially those of women—from historical memory. Her artistic strategy considers archives as tools for recovering the truth about the past in order to fight for social justice and as a message for the present and future. She is engaged in individual and collective practices that counteract discrimination and violence against marginalized individuals and groups. In 2018, she received her doctorate from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Spaces of Ignorance, 2018). Her interdisciplinary art project, "Freedom Volunteers," about Jewish participants in the International Brigades, was presented as part of the exhibition "Niepodległe. Women and National Discourse" at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2018/19), at the exhibition "Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds" at the Latvian National Museum in Riga (2020/21), and subsequently at the National Art Gallery in Vilnius (2022). Her research-based art-activism project, "Mechitsa. Individual and Collective Women's Resistance during the Holocaust," was exhibited at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (2019), "Still Present!" The 12th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art (2022), the Center for Jewish History in New York (2022/23), the Mala Galerija in Ljubljana (2023), and as part of the project "Materializing: Contemporary Art and the Shoah in Poland" at the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich (2023). She is currently developing a project devoted to Jewish women anarchists. Her recent work also features the motif of the biblical Lilith, the rebel from Eden, through which Hertzberg translates the message of women's autonomy into the current socio-political context. Her works are held in private and institutional collections. She is a co-founder of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Bloc and a board member of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. www.zuzannahertzberg.com

The webinar will be moderated by Masza Makarova from the Education Department of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

We provide translation from Polish into English.

The meeting with Zuzanna Hertzberg is part of a series of monthly webinars related to the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, organized by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage as part of the project "80th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising".