Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz.
From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.
Nancy Sinkoff is the academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and professor of Jewish studies and history at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She is author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, of "Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz" the introductory essay to Dawidowicz's reissued From that Place and Time, A Memoir, 1938–1947, and co-editor with Rebecca Cypess of Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin.
What People are Saying About This
Kevin Alan Brook of the Jews of Khazaria
Sinkoff's biography of Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz succeeds on every level. It is informative as well as engaging reading and her treatment of its subjects is even-handed.
Deborah E. Lipstadt of Antisemitism Here and Now
Lucy Dawidowicz's life and career encapsulates much of the Jewish experience since the time of World War II. She was in Poland immediately before the war, in Germany right after the war, and at the heart of the political debate that would roil and continues to roil the American Jewish community over the past seventy years. Often ignored by historians because she was a woman, Dawidowicz regains her rightful place in the annals of American Jewish history thanks to this compelling and meticulously researched biography by Nancy Sinkoff.
Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History, University of Virginia - James Loeffler
In this masterful biography of a pioneering scholar-intellectual, Sinkoff reveals precisely how American Jewish politics came to be bound by the golden chains of memory and trauma to the vanished world of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. In the process, she sets a new standard for American Jewish political history.
