Renée Poznanski

Origins and early life

Renée Poznanski was born in Paris on 26 April 1949 into a Jewish family of Russian origin, in the first generation born in France after the war that had emptied so many of those families. She emigrated to Israel in 1973 and taught from that year at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, rising from lecturer to full professor and holding, from 2001, the Yaakov and Poria Avnon chair in Holocaust studies.

Work and career

Her subject has been the Jews of France under the German occupation, and her Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, published in 1994 and translated into English in 2001, is the standard account: it set aside the argument over institutions and asked instead what it was actually like to be a Jew in France in those years, day by day, in the queues, the schools, the lodgings and the paperwork. She has written on the Jewish resistance and, in Propagandes et persécutions in 2008, on what the clandestine press said and did not say about the fate of the Jews, a book that changed the debate on what the French resistance knew.

She received the Prix Henri-Hertz twice, in 1987 and 2009, and the Jacob Buchman Prize for Holocaust memory from Yad Vashem.