Alice Shalvi

Alice Shalvi, who has lived in Jerusalem since 1949, headed the Pelech Experimental High School for Religious Girls, was founding Chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network and chairs the Executive of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies.

In 1953, a student of mine at the Hebrew University who had been a “hidden child” in Belgium during World War II presented me with a copy of the diary, which I read at once, I was 27,

In the 1980s, when I learned from Carol Gilligan that Otto Frank had expurgated those parts of the diary which he thought unseemly, I realized that Anne Frank was another example of young women silenced by their elders, particularly the male adults who have authority in the household and with whom, presumably (and paradoxically), they have a better relationship than with their mothers.

Thus she became for me a victim not only of the Nazi regime but also of patriarchal society, I was very happy when the full text was published, revealing an even more rounded personality, with normal adolescent sexual urges and with even more profound insight into the complexities of relationships between men and women, husbands and wives. What a novelist she would have been had she lived!