Contextualizing the Jewish Orphan Experience

Bernice Lerner’s All the Horrors of War and Marlene Trestman’s Most Fortunate Unfortunates

After two years at the Center for Jewish History, the Scholars Working Group “Hear Their Cry:” Understanding the Jewish Orphan Experience presents a talk with two group members about their new books.

Bernice Lerner is a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. She is the author of The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives and coeditor of Happiness and Virtue beyond East and West: Towards a New Global Responsibility. Dr. Lerner will present on her new book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (2020), in which she focuses on the life of her mother, Rachel Genuth. Michael Berenbaum writes, “All the Horrors of War is a powerful and poignant tale that traces both the arc of the war and the history of the Holocaust. In this meticulously researched and detailed account, Lerner never lets the reader forget the humanity of the victims or their liberators.”

Marlene Trestman is an attorney and author of Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin. With exhaustive research and engaging prose, Trestman’s Fair Labor Lawyer recounts Margolin’s inspirational journey from New Orleans Jewish Orphans Home through the New Deal to the nation’s highest courts, where she shepherded the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Prompted by her research on Margolin’s early life and by her own childhood in New Orleans as a Jewish orphan, Trestman’s latest work is Most Fortunate Unfortunates: New Orleans Jewish Orphans’ Home, 1855-1946, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press.