Deborah Dwork

Debórah Dwork, is an American historian. She is the Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dwork is the daughter of mathematician Bernard Dwork, and sister of computer scientist Cynthia Dwork.

Dwork earned a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.P.H. from Yale University, and a Ph.D. from University College London. Prior to holding the Rose Professorship, she was an Associate Professor at the Yale University Child Study Center. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she has held fellowships, most notably, from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Dwork's early scholarship established her as a social historian who pioneered the use of oral history and primary documents as complementary, mutually enriching sources. A scholar of Public Health, she published a study of immigrant Jews in New York in the period 1880–1914. At the same time, she began to focus on the history of childhood. In her first book, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children (1987), Dwork examined questions about the family, the role of women, and the concept of children's rights in the context of the development of the modern welfare system.

Recognizing that history focused on the adult world and that children were seen, principally, as future participants in that realm, Dwork imagined a new “child-centered” approach. She moved from the history of childhood as a social construct to the history of children as subjects and actors. Her historical analysis used children’s experiences as a lens through which to view all of society. A wholly original theoretical development, Dwork’s child-centered history opened a new area of historical investigation. In her now classic Children With A Star (1991), Dwork gave voice to the silenced children of the Holocaust; it was the first history of the daily lives of young people caught in the net of Nazisim. Children With A Star was also a pioneer work in the use of oral histories, conducted and recorded by Dwork. The book became the subject of a documentary of the same name by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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