The Making of a Historian of East European Jewry and the Holocaust: Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the YIVO in Vilna, New York, and Offenbach

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This talk by Nancy Sinkoff will explore the influence of the YIVO on Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a postwar American Jewish public intellectual and historian, who was central to the field that is now called “Holocaust Studies.” Witness to the vital Jewish world of pre-war Vilna, shaped by the group of refugee and survivor historians at the New York YIVO during the war, and an activist working with Jewish DPs and salvaging Jewish cultural treasures in Germany after the war, Dawidowicz played a principal role in the construction of postwar American Holocaust consciousness. With The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967) and The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (1975), a classic of “intentionalist” Holocaust historiography that emphasized the centrality of Hitler’s antisemitic ideology to the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” Dawidowicz became a central authority on East European Jewry, the Holocaust, and antisemitism in the postwar years.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speaker

Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers—New Brunswick. She is author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2004), recently reissued digitally with a new preface and of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (2020; pb 2022), winner of the fall 2020 Natan Notable Book award and the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Biography. With Rebecca Cypess, she co-edited Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018), winner of the outstanding book prize from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. Her other edited volumes include Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (2023, with Halina Goldberg), a volume accompanied by a website, “Soundscapes of Modernity: Jews and Music in Polish Cities,” devoted to little-heard instrumental and choral Polish Jewish music: polishjewishmusic.iu.edu; and A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History (with Jonathan Karp, James Loeffler, and Howard Lupovitch, 2024).