Introduction to Open Forum Gender Studies and the Holocaust

In the current issue of EEHS Open Forum we would like to recognize the work and career of an exceptional scholar, historian and friend on the occasion of her 60th birthday.The importance of Andrea Pet and her influence in the field of gender studies, her ever original research and historical interpretation, as well as her unbeatable character, have been an inspiration to her friends, colleagues and students not only in Hungary and Austriaplaces where she has spent most of her time working and livingbut indeed transnationally.It is our aim to reflect on the impact of gender studies on Holocaust research, and in the same way to facilitate discussion on these topics.Therefore, in place of candles on a cake, we would like to present several articles that deal with the ways in which the work of our colleague Andrea Pet has influenced scholarship in the field of gender history, as well as Holocaust and memory studies.Andrea Pet's academic life has been anything but solely academic.Ever since her early days as a historian and educator, she became known as a fierce warrior for academic freedom and integrity.She never succumbed to the lure of fashionable theories for their sake alone or to any kind of groupthink, but forged her beliefs with hard work, and vigorously contested the pressures of power structures against intellectual honesty and the rights of the individual.This Open Forum works primarily in relation to Andrea Pet's work on Gender and the Holocaust