Shira Klein

**Shira Klein** is an associate professor of history at Chapman University, specializing in the history of Italian Jews.

## Career

Klein got her PhD from New York University before joining Chapman University in 2012. In 2018, her book _Italy's Jews from Emancipation to Fascism_ won the double finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She teaches the history of Jews, Europe and the Holocaust at her university.

### Research

Klein's research areas include the history of Italian Jews, and online antisemitism.

#### Research on Holocaust distortion on Wikipedia

In February 2023, Klein and Jan Grabowski published the 57-page article _Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust_ in _The Journal of Holocaust Research_ in which they said to have found widespread distortion of Poland's Holocaust history on English Wikipedia, which involved the exaggeration of Jewish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers, invention of Jewish "war crimes" against Poles, downplaying of Polish collaboration with Nazi/Soviet occupiers and blaming Jews for their own suffering in the Holocaust.

Klein and Grabowski also criticized English Wikipedia's administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation's lack of will to handle, leaving the site vulnerable to disinformation:

Some misconceptions about the Holocaust in Poland discussed in their article are summarized as follows:

|Type|Summary|
| --- | --- |
|**Myth 1:** "3 million non-Jewish Poles were killed in WWII." **Fact:** The number was claimed in 1946 by Jakub Berman, the head of the Polish communist secret police, to create a false equivalence between Jewish and Polish victimhood. The death toll of non-Jewish Poles was 1.8 million as per the most recent estimates.||
|**Myth 2:** "Thousands of Poles were executed for helping Jews." **Fact:** 800 Poles were executed for helping Jews as per the most recent estimates.||
|**Myth 3:** "450,000 Poles hid Jews in their houses during the Holocaust." **Fact:** The number was promoted by Władysław Żarski-Zajdler, a writer propagandizing for the Polish communist regime during the 1968 antisemitic campaign. Fewer than 30,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust.||
|**Myth 4:** "<1% Poles collaborated with Nazi occupiers." **Fact:** Several independent research showed otherwise.||
|**Myth 5:** "Many Polish Blue Police were executed for refusing to follow Nazi orders to arrest Jews." **Fact:** Proven cases have not been found by mainstream historians yet. Instead, the Polish Blue Police helped Nazi occupiers kill Jews enthusiastically.||
|**Myth 6:** "The Polish Underground State's court investigated 17,000 suspected Polish collaborators and sentenced 3,500 to death." **Fact:** No more than seven collaborators were sentenced to death by the Polish Underground State's court, despite desperate requests from the Committee to Aid Jews (Żegota).||
|**Myth 7:** "Poles were specifically targeted by the Nazis for helping Jews. The Nazis imposed death penalty on Poles because of this." **Fact:** Nazi laws against helping Jews were applied equally to millions of non-German subjects under Nazi occupation. The death penalty was introduced on October 15, 1941, long before any obvious help could have been noticed.||
|**Myth 8:** "Polish Army officer Witold Pilecki told the Allies about the Holocaust via Polish government-in-exile courier Jan Karski." **Fact:** Jan Karski did not tell the Allies about the Holocaust. Karski left Poland in fall 1942, while Pilecki did not write a report about the Holocaust until summer 1943, when most Polish Jews had already been killed. Pilecki could not have given Karski a report that did not exist when Karski left.||
|**Myth 9:** "The Nazi murdered 20,000 Polish villagers in Białka over some of them helping Jews." **Fact:** It is true that individual shootings of Białka's Polish villagers happened, but the confirmed death toll was 96.||
|**Myth 10:** "The July 1946 Kielce pogrom was planned by the Soviet occupiers." **Fact:** The claim has been roundly rejected by mainstream scholars, including Joanna Tokarska-Bakir who won the 2019 Yad Vashem International Book Award for a book that disproved the claim, which is only held by some Polish nationalists and conspiracy theorists.||

#### 2020s

- Klein, S.; Levitsky, H.; Mueller, A.; Aarons, V.; Painitz, S.; Kaminsky, A.; Lander, J.; Mostowski, L.; Nadel, I.; Omer-Sherman, R.; Grinberg M. _The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture_, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

#### 2010s

- Klein, S. _Italy's Jews from emancipation to fascism_, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

#### 2020s

- Klein, S. (2025). The Growing Rift between Holocaust Scholars over Israel/Palestine. _The Journal of Genocide Research_, 1‒21.
- Grabowski, J. & Klein, S. (2023). Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust. _The Journal of Holocaust Research_, _37_(2), 133‒190.

#### 2010s

- Klein S. (2019). Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, _The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy_.
- Klein S. (2018). Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses. _Israel Studies Review_, _33_(1), 102‒109.
- Klein S. (2017). Challenging the Myth of Italian Jewish Assimilation. _Modern Judaism-A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience_, _37_(1), 76‒107.

#### 2000s

- Klein S. (2008). An Army of Housewives: Women's Wartime Columns in Two Mainstream Israeli Newspapers. _Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues_, 88‒107.

## Related pages

- Havi Dreifuss
- Shimon Redlich
- Saul Friedländer
- Izabella Tabarovsky