Shana Penn
Shana Penn
Bio
From her bio at University of California Berkeley:[1] Shana Penn is Executive Director of Taube Philanthropies and a scholar-in-residence at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley. Her award-winning book, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005) was published in Polish in 2014 as Sekret Solidarnosci (W.A.B. Publishers). She has a Master’s degree in European Studies from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Other books include Gender Politics and Everyday Life in Central and Eastern Europe, co-edited with Jill Massino (Palgrave USA 2009) and chapters in Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women Writers edited by Wendy Martin (Beacon Press 1996), and the Routledge Handbook of Women in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2020).
Women's Movements On-line: The New Post-Socialist Revolution
Shana Penn wrote her experience as executive director Network of East-West Women at the SAIS Review, 1996:[2]
Women's Movements On-line: The New Post-Socialist Revolution by Shana Penn
- Jelica Todosijevic, feminist activist and email trainer in Serbia, comments:
- "Last year at about this time, we [women in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union] discovered e-mail. After that, nothing was like before. Now we are no longer imprisoned by state limitations and censorship. Now we can read and learn the same things that the rest of the world does and contribute with our own experiences."
- Six years ago this autumn, when the communist bloc collapsed and its hermetic borders opened, thousands of westerners began entering the region, driven by curiosity for the people and forces that effect social change. As one US human rights activist wrote that winter, 'The revolutions were astounding to witness. The bit of democracy that has been won is precious and fragile, and we in the West share responsibility for protecting it, now that the excitement and drama is being replaced by the very real demands of political and economic change."
- Shana Penn is executive director of Network of East-West Women, In Washington, D.C. and a writer completing a book about women's roles in anti-Communist opposition movements in central Europe.
- For their contributions, Ms. Penn wishes to thank: Roma Ciesla, Jyothi Kanics, Eliza Klose; Marjorie Lightman, Sonia Jaffe Robbins, Amy Rubin, Ann Snitow, Jelica Todosijevic, Victoria Vrana, and Galina Vendiktova.