Joanna Michlic

Senior Fellow, IASS

Director, Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust, HBI, (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute), Brandeis University

M.A., Ph.D., U. of London
B.A. U. Lodz

Dr. Michlic received her doctorate and her master’s degree in modern European and Jewish history from University of London, and her bachelor’s degree in Slavonic studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. Until December 2008 she was Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Holocaust and Ethical Values at Lehigh University, Bethlehem Pennsylvania. She is an Affiliated Fellow at the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies and the Center for Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University. Her major publications include Neighbors Respond: The Controversy about Jedwabne (2004; co-edited with Antony Polonsky) and Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (2006, 2008 paperback edition)(Polish and Hebrew translations in preparation). She is currently working on two monographs, The Social History of Jewish Children in Poland: Survival and Identity, 1945—1949 and Bringing the Dark to Light: The Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, co-edited with John-Paul Himka.

Her publications on Jewish childhood in wartime and post-1945 Poland include: “”Who Am I?” The Identity of Jewish Children in Poland, 1945-1949.” Polin, Vol. 20, Focusing on Memorialization the Holocaust, (2007); “The Children Accuse, 1946: Between Exclusion From and Inclusion Into the Holocaust Canon,” in Krzysztof Ruchniewicz and Jürgen Zinnecker eds., Zwischen Zwangsarbeit, Holocaust und Vertreibung. Polnische, jüdische und deutsche Kindheiten im besetzten Polen. ( München, 2007) and also online in the Newsletter of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, H-Childhood, No. 9, February 2007; and Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Early Post-War Recollections of Survival and Polish-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust published by Search and Research Lectures and Papers, no. 14, Yad Vashem. Her “The “Raw Memory of War:” the Reading of Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock,” appeared in vol. 37, no. 1, 2009, Yad Vashem Studies.