From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History

Nancy Sinkoff
$34.99
Publication Date: March 10th, 2020
Publisher:
Wayne State University Press
ISBN:
9780814345108
Pages:
538
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Description

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.

About the Author

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.