Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust – Reactions by Lori R. Weintrob

It is an honor to be asked to contribute to a festschrift as a tribute to Andrea Pet, with reflections on the development of the field of gender studies and the Holocaust.This offers us an opportunity to share views on challenges, critical issues, achievements and the enrichment of perspectives in the area of gender and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.As Dalia Ofer writes early in her essay: "the interdependence of a community of scholars is crucial," which makes this interdisciplinary exchange particularly rewarding.The essays also highlight challenges in terms of historical writing and global politics.Ofer emphasizes how invaluable Pet's work is to understanding the "involvement of the population in the ghettoization and deportation of Hungarian Jews" and particularly "the role of women in far-right movements."In particular, Ofer notes how Pet presents with extensive detail eye-witness accounts of the events at 64 Csengery Street, so that the reader follows the rioters as they move through the spaces committing atrocities.In relation to the post-war trial, Pet "analyzes the narrative of each source," offering insight into conflicting, evolving and even misleading eye-witness accounts of looting and killing and underlying motives of antisemitism.In The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators of the Second World War, she shows how 15,000 women of the Arrow Cross were active participants in the "intimate murder" and discrimination between Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors and acquaintances, often overlooked in popular memories of the Holocaust.Ofer focuses on how Pet examines not only the killing of Jews in Hungary itself but also how this violence is both remembered and forgotten, as part of what Pet calls "polarized memory cultures about the Second World War."In moving language, Ofer explains how Pet's writing about Aniko (Hanna) Szenes offers a "richness" of research and methodology that reflects her "dual interest" as a "historian who is