CUTV News Radio spotlights Holocaust Scholar Dr. Mary J. Gallant

Glassboro, NJ – Dr. Mary J. Gallant is an associate professor of sociology at Rowan University. As a dedicated academic, Dr. Gallant is a Holocaust scholar with an awareness of the Holocaust as a turning point in the lives of millions of European Jews.

“What I’m interested in exploring this time in our history and giving voice to the people who experienced these atrocities,” says Dr. Gallant. “I wanted to use their testimonies to teach all of us something that we may grow closer to the Jewish tradition that informs all of the traditions.”

Dr. Gallant’s first position was with a small graduate school where she developed grant proposals to support her own research. One of these research grants involved a community ethnography and in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors who had remained silent about their traumatic memories but could not forget.

“We thought of these interviews as a portrait,” says Dr. Gallant. “I was interested in what had been imprinted on their souls. Through captivity and abuse, how did they persevere?”

These interviews inspired Dr. Gallant’s book Coming of Age in the Holocaust: The Last Survivors Remember, which explored aspects of their survival as emerging from the ingenuity of the survivors themselves under captivity and abuse.

“The Holocaust survivors who had been children that survived the camps or in hiding or with the resistance in different ways became something I explored in great depths,” says Dr. Gallant. “They shared their experience of cruelty, hatred, and indifference, opening a window into the soul that inspires both grief and wonder. What they shared left an imprint on my soul that is still sharp and clear in my memory.”