Lucy Dawidowicz: Dispassionate Historian and Bold Defender of Jewish Interests

In any given generation, there are only a handful of thinkers who can cogently challenge every unthinking piety and every conventional foolishness that passes for wisdom, and yet are neither cranks nor curmudgeons. For post-World War II American Jewry, Lucy Dawidowicz was just such a figure; and rarer still, she was at the same time a rigorous and gifted historian. She witnessed and chronicled the last year of Jewish Vilna, helped return one of the greatest collections of Jewish books and documents to Jewish hands, aided Jewish refugees in post-war Europe, wrote one of the landmark accounts of the Holocaust, and anticipated many of the ideas of the neoconservative movement.

Dawidowicz’s unorthodox perspectives stemmed in part from a fierce independence of thought, and in part from her exposure during her formative years to the rich mental world of East European Jewry and the time she spent in Europe just before and just after the Holocaust. Now, in a new biography From Left to Right: Lucy Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of the Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff, a professor at Rutgers University, tells the story of Dawidowicz’s intellectual evolution.

Like many of the New York intellectuals lionized in scholarly and popular accounts, Dawidowicz was born in an economically precarious immigrant family in the Bronx, just before World War I. She attended New York’s free public colleges, in her case, Hunter. And she was immersed in the world of socialism. By the time she died in 1990 at the age of seventy-five, she had written several books that had attracted wide attention, most notably The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967) and The War against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), and published more than 50 articles in Commentary on themes ranging from American Jewish politics to the role of religion in American life.