Emily Leah Silverman's book, Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps, is a major contribution to the literature on German Jewish women in the Nazi era. Silverman has written a powerful testimony to the vision of these two women and their ministry in this time of insane violence and attempted extermination of the Jewish people. Silverman writes a profoundly insightful study of these two women and their diverse paths of spiritual leadership.

Edith Stein (1891–1942) grew up in an observant Jewish family in Breslau, Germany, but as a woman received no in-depth knowledge of her faith. She developed a deep desire for knowledge at an early age, receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1916. She studied under the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and wrote her dissertation on “The Problem of Empathy.” She worked as Husserl's assistant at the University of Freiburg, but was denied a habilitational thesis because she was a woman. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the University of Münster, but was forced to resign in 1933 due to the anti-Semitic legislation of the Nazis that forbade employment of Jews.