In From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff has done the important work of reclaiming Lucy Dawidowicz's significance as an American public intellectual in the years after World War II. Although few scholars have previously identified Dawidowicz as a member of the famed New York Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff makes a compelling case for this categorization. Despite Dawidowicz's significance in helping to establish the intentionalist school of Holocaust thought, which argued for the primacy of Hitler's antisemitism in explaining the origins of the Holocaust, she has mostly been forgotten in books on New York Jewish intellectuals, and has similarly fallen off the map of American intellectual history, and of American Jewish history. By describing Dawidowicz's friendships with figures like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, and by highlighting her public prominence as an interpreter of the Holocaust and of eastern European Jewish culture, as well as expertise in Yiddish language and literature, Sinkoff reclaims Dawidowicz's significance in American Jewish and intellectual life.
As the title of the book suggests, Dawidowicz moved politically from liberal to conservative over the course of her life, a trajectory that mirrored that of many other New York Jewish intellectuals. Born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Dawidowicz lived in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, and attended high school and college in New York City. She was also deeply involved in the secular Yiddishist community of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. Like other New York Jewish intellectuals, the left-wing politics of this environment shaped her early life as a member of the Young Communist League and National Student League.
By 1938, however, like many on the Left, she had broken with the Soviet Union, and intensified her studies of Yiddish, accepting a fellowship as a graduate student at the YIVO in Vilna, and departing for research in Poland that same year. Those experiences became defining ones in shaping her identification with Polish Jews facing destruction. Dawidowicz barely escaped the Nazi occupation and felt deeply all her life the deaths of her friends and patrons in Poland. Immediately after the war, she worked with the YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee, tracking down and collecting the Yiddish literary treasures scattered throughout Europe, as well as working with survivors in DP camps.
In 1949, she began almost twenty years on the staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During that time, Sinkoff shows, her politics moved steadily rightwards. Her reports on communism and the Soviet Union reflected her fervent anticommunism and anxieties about Jewish radicalism, while her work on religious minorities and Black-Jewish relationships in the United States reflected at first the standard liberal position of the AJC, but increasingly signaled dissent from strict separation of church and state, and discomfort with Black social and cultural differences from Jews. By the late 1960s, when she left the AJC, her politics had already turned inward to the history and well-being of the Jewish community and rightward away from the universal ideologies that marked Jewish liberalism.
That preoccupation with eastern European Jewish history was the final and perhaps most significant chapter of her life, as described by Sinkoff. Dawidowicz published two major books that established her as an expert in eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust—The Golden Tradition and Hitler's War against the Jews—and cemented her relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, who at that moment were experiencing a similar political and intellectual turn towards Judaism, the Jewish community, and the Holocaust. Although she had planned on publishing a major book on the history of the American Jewish community towards the end of her life, she never completed it; it was her work on eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust that marked her professional and personal career until her death in 1990.
By tracing Dawidowicz's eastern European training and identity and by identifying Dawidowicz as a member of the New York intellectual circle that turned to neoconservatism in the 1960s, Sinkoff is able to develop the central and provocative argument of her book: that New York Jewish intellectuals and their famous conflicts with one another and with others were “an American manifestation of modernizing European Jewry's culture wars, which can also be traced back to the late eighteenth century” (205). Sinkoff, a European Jewish historian, notes that New York Jewish intellectuals viewed leftist ideology as comprised of two central elements: first, defense of individual freedoms and civil liberties, and second, social justice to be achieved through the welfare state. As they moved rightward, they argued that social justice threatened individual rights, and thereby reinscribed older battles between the Maskilim of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and traditional Jewish communities, as they confronted the modernizing forces of the European Enlightenment. After first identifying liberalism as the modern force that would safeguard their rights as Jews, neoconservatives came to believe that it was more traditional hierarchies and authority that would do so. As they fought with one another, and with other Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff argues, New York Jewish intellectuals, just like the Maskilim, sought to represent the true or authentic Jewish response to the modern world.
Placing New York Jewish intellectuals—through the history of Dawidowicz—in this broader context is thought provoking and challenging. Sinkoff does not necessarily note a similar turn towards conservatism among the Maskilim; instead it is New York intellectuals’ efforts to assimilate into a modern Western culture and their aspirations for intellectual leadership in the Jewish community that lead her to place intellectuals like Dawidowicz within this framework. And it is Dawidowicz's grounding in eastern European Jewish life and culture that makes her perhaps the most apt and intriguing of all the New York intellectuals, and which makes this argument persuasive. Certainly, the battle over the “Jewishness” of New York Jewish intellectuals is deepened by the provocative argument that they were actually recreating European Jewish battles over modernity.
An American Jewish historian might demand more attention to the New York of the postwar era to give more context to Dawidowicz's intellectual journey; Sinkoff's focus on Dawidowicz's Polish experience in the 1930s and 1940s can sometimes overwhelm her discussion of America in the 1960s and 1970s. And scholars of Jewish women may feel that there is more to be said about Dawidowicz's experiences with gender discrimination in highly masculine spaces. Other scholars should embrace these efforts in years to come.
By exploring with impressive research the work of a forgotten historical figure like Dawidowicz, Nancy Sinkoff has breathed new life into the well-trodden subject of the New York Jewish intellectuals, while also offering a cogent critique of American Jewish exceptionalism.
