Profiles of 2001 Graduating Students

Shanna Bar-Giora views the Holocaust through study of women's literature

Senior Shanna Bar-Giora, from Merrick, N.Y., has spent the past four years as a Cornell Presidential Research Scholar. One of her interests is the Holocaust, and her research has led her to consider the role of women in the literature of the genocide.

Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography Shanna Bar-Giora

By Shanna T. Bar-Giora '01

The Holocaust has always fascinated me. I suppose my interest stems from an insatiable desire to learn what makes people do extraordinary things -- on both the positive and negative fronts. It also comes from my strong identification with Jewish culture and history. I am an observant Jew, raised with a strong awareness of religious identification in a Modern Orthodox household. I have been to Israel many times (to visit family and to travel) and make a point of going to Yad Vashem on most of these trips.

While I don't fixate on the Holocaust as the point of departure for my religious identity, I recognize that for many Jews worldwide (and especially in the United States) it serves as the focus for their connection to Jewish culture and Jewish history as a whole.

My project grew out of my major -- English -- and my love of poetry. The focus of my research for my senior project/honors thesis, "The Voice of a Woman: Heroism and Remembrance in American Women's Holocaust Poetry," was not survivors' tales but rather the writings of American women a generation removed from the Holocaust.

My thought processes operated almost in reverse. In the fall of my junior year, I took "Jewish American Writing" (ENGL 479) with Joel Porte [the E.I. White Professor of American Studies], who is my academic adviser. We read excerpts from Ruth Whitman's long poem, The Testing of Hanna Senesh. Something about the text immediately grabbed my attention; I'm not sure whether it was the bravery inherent in Hanna's story or Whitman's massive undertaking in trying to relive Senesh's life. Whatever the case, the poem lurked in the back of my mind over the next few months as I tried to narrow the focus of my thesis.

For my final paper in that course, I identified and contextualized references in Adrienne Rich's "Eastern War Time," which also ended up figuring prominently in my thesis. Ultimately, I chose to focus on a very small segment of Jews: American women who forge their identity through their writing. My thesis adviser, Roger Gilbert [professor of English], helped me focus on aspects of this topic: What makes a woman's voice unique? How is heroism presented? What purpose does it serve?

This relates to my other big interest -- the status of women within the observant Jewish community. This can best be understood from the personal statement I submitted with my application to Columbia Law School, which I will be attending in the fall. Essentially, my concern is for women whose husbands will not grant a religious divorce (as only the man can do under Orthodox Jewish law) and thereby imprison them in a life of solitude (since loopholes allow him to remarry). Although not a common occurrence, the problem does involve thousands of women around the world.

This issue sparked a passion in me to explore the status of women within many religious contexts, and I intend to use my legal training to fight domestic violence and related issues within religious communities. This is not just a Jewish concern -- as I understand it, this is an issue of concern for women within the Muslim community as well. I took a course in Islamic law this past fall at Cornell and would like to pursue that course of study as well.

As I wrote in my law school application, "I will use my education in American law and familiarity with Jewish law to help to free one of these women so that she may carry on with her life. One woman, and then another one."