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Lucy Dawidowicz

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Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz (June 16, 1915 – December 5, 1990) was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.

Life

Dawidowicz was born in New York City as Lucy Schildkret.[1] Her parents, Max and Victoria (née Ofnaem) Schildkret were secular-minded Jews with little interest in religion. Dawidowicz did not attend a service at a synagogue until 1938.[2]

Dawidowicz's first interests were poetry and literature. She attended Hunter College from 1932–36 and obtained a B.A. in English. She went on to study for a M.A. at Columbia University, but abandoned her studies because of concerns over events in Europe. At the encouragement of her mentor, the historian Jacob Shatzky, Dawidowicz decided to focus on history, especially Jewish history. Dawidowicz made the decision to learn Yiddish, and, at Shatzky's urging, she traveled to Wilno, Poland (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1938 to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (known by its Yiddish acronym as the YIVO). With the help of Shatzky she became a research fellow there.[2]

Dawidowicz lived in Wilno until August 1939 when she returned to the United States. During her time at the YIVO, she became close to three of the leading scholars there, namely Zelig Kalmanovich, Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reisen. Weinreich escaped the Holocaust because he went to New York to establish a branch of the YIVO there before World War II, but Kalmanovich and Reisen perished. Dawidowicz had been close to Kalmanovich and his family, whom she reportedly described as being her real parents.[2] From 1940 until 1946, Dawidowicz worked as an assistant to a research director at the New York office of the YIVO. During the war, like most Americans, she was aware of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people in Europe, though it was not until after the war that she became aware of the full extent of the Holocaust. [citation needed]

In 1946, Dawidowicz traveled back to Europe where she worked as an aid worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the various Displaced Persons (DP) camps. During this period, she involved herself in the search for various looted books in Frankfurt and their retrieval for YIVO.[2] and was involved with providing aid for Holocaust survivors. She realized that the world of Eastern European Jewry that she had encountered and lived among in Poland before the war had been destroyed forever, and all that was left of it were the emaciated survivors she was working with and her own memories. [citation needed]

In 1947, she returned to the U.S. and on January 3, 1948, she married a Polish Jew, Szymon Dawidowicz. Upon her return to the U.S. she worked as a researcher for the novelist John Hersey's book The Wall, a dramatization of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. From 1948 until 1960, Dawidowicz worked as a historical researcher for the American Jewish Committee. During the same period, Dawidowicz wrote frequently for Commentary, the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. [citation needed]

An enthusiastic New York Mets fan, Dawidowicz lived the rest of her life in New York. In 1985, she founded the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature from Yiddish and Hebrew into English. A fierce anti-Communist, Dawidowicz campaigned for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. She died in New York City in 1990, aged 75, from undisclosed causes. [citation needed]

Public criticism by Dawidowicz

Dawidowicz’s major interests were the Holocaust and Jewish history.[3] A passionate Zionist,[4] Dawidowicz believed that had the Mandate for Palestine been implemented as intended, establishing the Jewish State of Israel prior to the Holocaust, "the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome".[5] Dawidowicz took an Intentionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust, contending that, beginning with the end of World War I on 11 November 1918, Hitler conceived his master plans, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal,[6] and that he had "openly espoused his program of annihilation" when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1924.[6]

Dawidowicz's conclusions was: "Through a maze of time, Hitler's decision of November 1918 led to Operation Barbarossa. There never had been any ideological deviation or wavering determination. In the end only the question of opportunity mattered."[6]

In her view, the overwhelming majority of Germans subscribed to the völkische antisemitism from the 1870s onward, and it was this morbid antisemitism that attracted support for Hitler and the Nazis. Dawidowicz maintained that from the Middle Ages onward, German Christian society and culture were suffused with antisemitism and there was a direct link from medieval pogroms to the Nazi death camps of the 1940s.

Citing Fritz Fischer, Dawidowicz argued there were powerful lines of continuity in German history and there was a Sonderweg (Special Path), which led Germany inevitably to Nazism.[7]

Dawidowicz criticized what she considered to be revisionist historians as incorrect and/or sympathetic to the Nazis.

For Dawidowicz, National Socialism was "the essence of evil, the daemon let loose in society, Cain in a corporate embodiment".[8] Regarding foreign policy questions, she sharply disagreed with A. J. P. Taylor over his book The Origins of the Second World War. In even stronger terms, she condemned the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan for his book, War Forced on Germany, as well as David Irving's revisionist Hitler's War, which suggested Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust.

Dawidowicz criticized German historians who sought to minimize German complicity in the Nazi era attempt to annihilate Europe's Jews.

In her view, historians who took a functionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust question were guilty of ignoring their responsibility to historical truth.[9]

Disputes with Arno Mayer

Dawidowicz was a leading critic of the American historian Arno J. Mayer's account of the Holocaust in his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? arguing that Mayer played up anti-communism at the expense of antisemitism as an explanation for the Holocaust.[10]

Dawidowicz titled her review of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? in the October 1989 edition of Commentary as "Perversions of the Holocaust".[11] Dawidowicz argued against Mayer that the historical evidence shows that Hitler was not convinced that the war was lost as early as December 1941, and that Mayer's theory is anachronistic.[12]

Dawidowicz commented that the Einsatzgruppen had been massacring Jews since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, and that Mayer's claim that the Jews were only surrogate victims due to Germany's inability to defeat the Soviet Union was, in her opinion, rubbish.[13]

Dawidowicz attacked Mayer for saying that more Jews died at Auschwitz from disease than from mass gassing, and for writing that Holocaust survivor testimony was highly unreliable as a historical source as supporting Holocaust denial.[14]

Dawidowicz questioned Mayer's motives in listing the works of Arthur Butz and Paul Rassinier in his bibliography.[15] Dawidowicz ended her review of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? by accusing Mayer of excusing German racism, rationalizing the Nazi dictatorship, of portraying Soviet Jews as better off than they were under the Soviet dictatorship, and by presenting the Holocaust as due to reasonable political goals instead of the ideological decision fueled by fanatical antisemitism that Dawidowicz saw as it as.[16]

Other

She accused the British historian Norman Davies of seeking to whitewash Polish antisemitism and of being an anti-Semite himself.[17]

During the same period, Dawidowicz denounced the work of the philosopher Ernst Nolte, whom she accused of seeking to justify the Holocaust.

In her The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, she writes that antisemitism has had a long history within Christianity.[18]

In her opinion, the line of "antisemitic descent" from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler was "easy to draw". She wrote that Hitler and Luther were both obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews, and that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern antisemitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass, which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus.

Although modern German antisemitism has roots in nationalism, Dawidowicz held that Christian antisemitism is linked to the Roman Catholic Church, and was the foundation "upon which Luther built".

Criticism of Dawidowicz

Raul Hilberg criticized Dawidowicz's The War Against The Jews, stating that it builds "largely on secondary sources and conveying nothing whatever that could be called new," and then going on to say in regards to Dawidowicz portrayal of Jewish resistance and resisters that she included "soup ladlers and all others in the ghettos who staved off starvation and despair." Hilberg suggests that "nostalgic Jewish readers [would find here] vaguely consoling words, [which] could be easily clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper." Regarding her The Holocaust and the Historians, Hilberg, like others,[19][20] was sharply critical, pausing in his autobiography only to note a review by leading Holocaust scholar Friedlander, who wrote:

Dawidowicz has a simple thesis, namely that "the murder of the European Jews [has been inadequately] recorded in the history books" (p. 1). In her attempt to prove this thesis she simply disregards all contrary evidence. She ignores the three scholarly histories of the Holocaust: Leon Poliakov's Bréviaire de la haine (1951), Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution (1953), and Raul Hilberg's magisterial study of The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). She also ignores such crucial recent monographs as Uwe Dietrich Adam's Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (1972), H. G. Adler's Der verwaltete Mensch (1974), and Christopher R. Browning's The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (1978). Dawidowicz further ignores the major histories about the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe, including H. G. Adler's monumental study of Theresienstadt or Randolph L. Braham's numerous works on the Hungarian Holocaust. She omits entire countries, disregarding the works published by the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, and the Leo Baeck Institute. She also disregards all works on refugees, rescue, resistance, and the response of governments and institutions, including monographs by Reuben Ainsztein, Gilbert Badia, Henry L. Feingold, Saul Friedländer, Meir Michaelis, Bernard Wasserstein, David Wyman, and Leni Yahil. Finally, she leaves out all works on the SS, police, and camps, including the Anatomy of the SS State by Hans Buchheim and others (1968); the studies of the SS by Gerald Reitlinger and Heinz Höhne; the books on the concentration camps by Elie A. Cohen, Benedikt Kautsky, Eugen Kogon, Eberhard Kolb, Hermann Langbein, and Hans Marsalek; and Adalbert Rückerl's NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (1977).[21]

Hilberg ends on the subject of Dawidowicz by noting: "To be sure, Dawidowicz has not been taken all that seriously by historians. I do not recall a single professional conference in which I saw her as a participant."[22]


Books by Dawidowicz

Her books include The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, her best-selling 1975 history of the Holocaust, and The Holocaust and the Historians, a study of Holocaust historiography.

A collection of her essays relating to Jewish history, What Is the Use of Jewish History?, was published posthumously in 1992. Dawidowicz wrote The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe to document Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe prior to its destruction during the Holocaust.

In On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981, Dawidowicz wrote an account of Jews in the United States that reflected an appreciation for her American citizenship, which saved her from being a victim herself in the Holocaust. [citation needed]

Published works

  • Politics In A Pluralist Democracy; studies of voting in the 1960 election, with a foreword by Richard M. Scammon, New York, Institute of Human Relations Press, 1963 (co-written with Leon J. Goldstein)
  • The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life And Thought In Eastern Europe, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967 (editor)
  • Reviews of The German Dictatorship by Karl Dietrich Bracher & The Foreign Policy Of Hitler's Germany by Gerhard Weinberg, pgs. 91–93 from Commentary, Volume 52, Issue # 2, August 1971.
  • The War Against The Jews, 1933-1945, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 1975; ISBN 0-03-013661-X
  • A Holocaust Reader, New York: Behrman House, 1976; ISBN 0-87441-219-6
  • The Jewish Presence: Essays On Identity And History, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977; ISBN 0-03-016676-4
  • Spiritual Resistance: Art From Concentration Camps, 1940-1945 : a selection of drawings and paintings from the collection of Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot, Israel, with essays by Miriam Novitch, Lucy Dawidowicz, Tom L. Freudenheim, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981; ISBN 0-8074-0157-9
  • The Holocaust and the Historians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. ISBN 0-674-40566-8.
  • On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982; ISBN 0-03-061658-1
  • From That Place And Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947, New York: W.W. Norton, 1989; ISBN 0-393-02674-4
  • Kozodoy, Neal, ed. (1992). What Is The Use Of Jewish history? : Essays, edited and with an introduction by. New York, NY: Schocken Books. ISBN 0-8052-4116-7.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Ware, Susan and Lorraine, Stacy. Notable American Women. 2004, pg. 154
  2. ^ a b c d Guide to the Papers of Lucy S. Dawidowicz
  3. ^ Scanlon, Jennifer and Cosner, Shaaron. American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s. 1996, pg. 56
  4. ^ Bosworth, R.J.B. Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima. 1994, pg. 89
  5. ^ Rubinstein, W.D. The Myth of Rescue. 1999, pg. 215
  6. ^ a b c Kershaw 2000, p. 97.
  7. ^ Dawidowicz 1981, pp. 63–5.
  8. ^ Dawidowicz 1981, pp. 20–1.
  9. ^ Dawidowicz 1981, p. 146.
  10. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, pp. 123–4.
  11. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, p. vii.
  12. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, pp. 127–8.
  13. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, p. 128.
  14. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, pp. 129–30.
  15. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, p. 130.
  16. ^ Dawidowicz 1992, pp. 131–2.
  17. ^ Dawidowicz, Lucy. "The Curious Case of Marek Edelman", pages 66-69 from Commentary, March 1987. [verification needed]
  18. ^ Dawidowicz, Lucy The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. Bantam: 1986, pg. 23; ISBN 0-553-34532-X [verification needed]
  19. ^ Bessel 1982.
  20. ^ Eley 1982.
  21. ^ Friedlander 1982, pp. 1364–5.
  22. ^ Hilberg 1996, pp. 143–7.

Bibliography

External links

See also

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