Can We Talk? (Jewish Women’s Archive podcast)
April 8, 2021
"They were women who carried cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear," says Judy Batalion, the author of The Light of Days, a new book about Jewish women resistance fighters in World War II who "blew up Nazi supply trains and shot and killed Gestapo men."
Read MoreTIME
April 8, 2021
On Yom Hashoah, we light memorial candles and mourn the dead. But which narratives of the Holocaust do we recall? Why have certain stories predominated our understanding while others have seemingly vanished?
Read MoreTimes of Israel
April 7, 2021
In 2007, author Judy Batalion happened upon a book housed at London’s British Library titled, “Freuen in di Ghettos.” Published in 1946 in New York, it was a collection (in Yiddish) of accounts of young Jewish women who had defied the Nazis through various acts of resistance.
Read MoreNew York Times Book Review
April 6, 2021
Judy Batalion was raised in Montreal surrounded by Holocaust survivor families with stories of loss and suffering. “My genes were stamped — even altered, as neuroscientists now suggest — by trauma,” she writes in “The Light of Days.” “I grew up in an aura of victimization and fear.”
Read MoreTablet
April 6, 2021
The next day, Freedom members met with community leaders to discuss a response. They proposed attacking the Jewish police—who weren’t armed—with clubs. They also wanted to incite mass demonstrations. Again, the leaders warned them not to react hastily or upset the Germans, cautioning that the murders of thousands of Jews would be on the young comrades’ heads.
Read MoreTablet
April 6, 2021
Every author looks forward to her book’s publication date. But for Judy Batalion, today is doubly important, because she has two books coming out.
Read MoreLit Hub
April 6, 2021
The British Library reading room smelled like old pages. I stared at the stack of women’s history books I had ordered—not too many, I reassured myself, not too overwhelming. The one on the bottom was the most unusual: hard-backed and bound in a worn, blue fabric, with yellowing, deckled edges. I opened it first and found virtually two hundred sheets of tiny script—in Yiddish.
Read MoreLilith
April 5, 2021
Assassinating Nazis, escaping death via sewers, and saving fellow Jews in World War II Poland sounds like an action movie, but it was real life for the Jewish women profiled in The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow).
Read MoreNPR Here & Now
April 5, 2021
In the 1940s, a group of young Jewish women living in the ghettos of Poland reacted to Adolf Hitler’s murderous campaign with unfathomable courage.
Read MoreInsider
April 5, 2021
After German dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Nazis began segregating millions of Jews in Eastern Europe into sections of towns and cities designated "ghettos," eventually stripping inhabitants of their belongings and rights and sealing them in with barricades and armed guards.
Read MoreHistory News Network
April 4, 2021
In 1959, writing about the Holocaust, scholar Mark Bernard highlighted that Jewish resistance was almost always considered a miracle, ethereal, beyond research scope. Still today, this impression generally persists. And yet, Jewish defiance was everywhere during the war, carried out in a multitude of ways, by all types of people.
Read MoreHaaretz
April 4, 2021
It takes something special to be even more astounding than a Matt Gaetz alibi, but Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” achieves that and much, much more.
Read MoreThe Globe and Mail
April 2, 2021
My grandmother, “Bubbe Zelda,” raised me. On 1980s afternoons, she took me to Mackenzie King park in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal, a verdant area flanked by Jewish community centres. Bubbe had survived the Holocaust and frequently told me stories about the murdered sisters she so missed. I
Read MoreElle Canada
April 2021
As a Jewish girl growing up in Montreal, Judy Batalion saw Hannah Senesh—one of the few female resistors in the Second World War—as a role model for female Jewish bravado.
Read MoreSmithsonian Magazine
April 1, 2021
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, sparking the beginning of World War II, the leaders of a Warsaw-based chapter of the Zionist HeHalutz youth movement instructed its members to retreat east. Initially, Frumka Płotnicka, a 25-year-old Jewish woman from the Polish city of Pinsk, complied with this request. But as historian Judy Batalion writes in The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, “[F]leeing a crisis did not suit her, and she immediately asked … [to] leave the area where her family lived and return to Nazi-occupied Warsaw.”
Read MoreGood Morning America (Book Club)
April 1, 2021
This epic, sweeping tale of Jewish women resistance fighters in WWII is powerful, incredibly well-written by genius Judy Batalion, and truly changes history. Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment already has a big screen version of this in the works!
Read MoreJewish Telegraphic Agency
March 31, 2021
They hid revolvers in teddy bears and dynamite in their underwear. They learned how to make lethal Molotov cocktails and fling them at German supply trains. The girls with “Aryan” features who could pass as non-Jews flirted with Nazis – plying them with wine, whiskey and pastry before shooting them dead.
Read MoreWall Street Journal
March 30, 2021
They were nicknamed the “ghetto girls” but the label does not do justice to the defiant, mostly forgotten Eastern European Jewish women in their teens and 20s who, acting in resistance to the Nazis, undertook one mission impossible after another to disrupt the machinery of the Holocaust and save as many Jews as they could.
Read MoreLilith
March 22, 2021
Judy Batalion is a first-class disrupter. In her fascinating—and essential—new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in in Hitler’s Ghettos(HarperCollins, $28.99) she cracks the myth of Jewish victimhood—and in particular Jewish women’s victimhood—wide open, and recounts so many instances of cunning and chutzpah that it will upend everything you thought you knew about the subject.
Read MoreHadassah Magazine
March 2021
It has been nearly 40 years since philosopher Joan Ringelheim and historian Esther Katz brought together Holocaust studies and women’s studies in the conference “Women Surviving: The Holocaust,” highlighting the lack of scholarship on gender issues during the cataclysm. Integrating women’s stories into Holocaust history is an ongoing task, and Judy Batalion’s extraordinary new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins), is an important part of the continuum of research begun at that historic 1983 conference in New York City.
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