The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies and the Graduate Theological Union are pleased to welcome Shana Penn to our community. Ms. Penn, who begins a three-year writing fellowship this fall, is the director of the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, a project of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture of the San Francisco Jewish Community Endowment Fund. She was recently a visiting scholar at Mills College in Oakland. Thanks to a generous grant from the Taube Foundation, she will be researching and writing her new book at the GTU.

Ms. Penn is the author of three books: The Woman’s Guide to the Wired World, Podziemie Kobiet (The Underground of Women), and the recently published history of the women of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland. In August, she traveled to Poland to participate in the events celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, including a reception hosted by the U.S. ambassador honoring her work and the women who inspired her book. This fall, Penn has been giving talks on her book around the Bay Area, including one in September at the GTU.

Penn’s own Judaism, coupled with her interest in Jewish history and culture, initially compelled her to explore Eastern Europe. Her original intent was to interview Holocaust survivors and examine why they returned to their countries after World War II. She also interviewed younger Jews about their anti-Communist politics and how their views were related to their faith.

Ms. Penn soon discovered, however, that publishers were less interested in this research than they were in her other academic passion, gender studies. While learning about Jewish activism in the anti-Communist Solidarity movement, she also began to investigate the unsung heroism of the women who kept the movement running while the male leaders were in hiding or prison during the martial law period of the 1980s. Key women, largely responsible for planting the seeds of a free press and civil society, had not been duly credited for their contributions to the pro-democracy movement. Penn wanted to understand why they had been overlooked and to study whether the society would eventually recognize them as Poland developed into a democracy.

The experience of researching and writing about these women’s extraordinary story gave her what she calls “faith in scholarship.” She realized that the issues and questions embedded in the narrative of women and political power in an emerging democracy required more time than the journalistic investigation she had originally set out to write. Solidarity's Secret combines history, sociology, and cultural anthropology to explore the intersection of politics, gender, and religion. “Solidarity itself,” she notes, “was forged by a unique coalition between the country’s working class, intellectuals and Catholic church. Within each faction, women performed distinctive and oftentimes politically significant roles.” It was the focused nature of her scholarship, Penn believes, that enabled the women’s voices to be finally heard.

Having completed her Solidarity studies, Penn now returns to the topic that first drew her to Poland. Her latest venture is a study of the reemergence of Jewish cultural expression in contemporary Poland—an unanticipated phenomenon that is being spearheaded by Jewish and Christian Poles. With her focus on the interplay between faith and politics, between cultural revival and political reconstruction, and between religious, ethnic, and gender identities, the groundbreaking work of Naomi Seidman and others at GTU provides a natural incubator for Penn’s future research. CJS and the GTU community are pleased with the addition of her voice to their dynamic intellectual conversations.

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