Lucy S. Dawidowicz

American historian

• Born: June 16, 1915
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 5, 1990
• Place of death: New York, New York

Dawidowicz was the author of several significant studies about the life of Eastern European Jews in the period before World War II and their experiences during the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis.

Early Life

Lucy S. Dawidowicz (da-VIH-doh-vits) was born in were chosen in a neighborhood settled by Jewish immigrants. Her parents, Max Schildkret and Dora Ofnaem Schildkret, had emigrated to New York from Poland, then a province within czarist Russia, sometime around 1908, when they were still in their teens. At first, they worked in the New York sweatshops. After their marriage, her parents tried their hand at several small businesses, but all of these endeavors failed. In 1927, they purchased a new four-family house in a developing section of the Bronx; by 1937, they were unable to make mortgage payments, and the bank foreclosed.

Although both of Lucy’s parents were reared in a religious environment of Orthodox Judaism, they ultimately rejected orthodoxy. Theirs was a secular faith expressed through the celebration of the Jewish holidays; pride in Jewish history; preservation of Yiddish, the vernacular language of Eastern European Jews; and advocacy of a Jewish socialist ideology. They were avid readers of the New York Yiddish press and wanted their daughter to have an understanding of Eastern European Jewish culture as well as American culture.

Education was the central focus of Lucy’s life. As a young child, she attended the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute to learn to read and write Yiddish. From 1928 to 1932, she went to classes at the elite Hunter College High School and, on the weekends, also attended the Sholem Aleichem Mitlshul, a Yiddish high school.

Despite the family’s economic hardship, Dawidowicz entered Hunter College in September of 1932. At that time, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression, and Adolf Hitler’s fascist domination of Germany was an imminent reality. During her undergraduate years, Bolshevik communism in the Soviet Union deeply affected her intellectual and emotional development. Nevertheless, she rejected the communist ideology by the time she was graduated from college.

After her graduation from Hunter College in 1936, Dawidowicz was unable to find a job. Her mother encouraged her to return to school to study for a master’s degree. In September of 1936, Dawidowicz enrolled at Columbia University, choosing courses in art, poetry, and philosophy. Despite her initial enthusiasm, she dropped out of the program after only a few weeks. Instead, her interest turned in the direction of Jewish studies, particularly the history and culture of Polish Jews. The disappearance of Yiddish culture in Poland seemed imminent, since contemporary Jews in Poland were experiencing severe poverty, and outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence were becoming commonplace. In 1937, Dawidowicz was accepted for readmission to Columbia, and she made plans to begin a research project on the Yiddish press in England.

Eventually, Dawidowicz applied for a 1938-1939 postgraduate fellowship at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna, Poland. In the late 1930’s, YIVO had become the center for research and study in Yiddish linguistics, history, social studies, and pedagogy. Dawidowicz’s decision to study at YIVO was an expression of her ardent belief that this institution might eventually become an international center of a self-sustaining Yiddish culture. Ignoring her family’s objections to her decision to go to Poland when it stood at the brink of war, Dawidowicz accepted a fellowship to YIVO and embarked on the Polish ocean linerBatons on August 1, 1938.

Life’s Work

Although her fellowship year at YIVO, surrounded by some of the most creative scholars of Yiddish life in Poland, was rich in cultural experiences, Dawidowicz decided to leave Vilna after one year because of the heightened threat of war. As she later recalled in her 1989 memoir From That Place and Time , “[E]very night we lay down to sleep and to dream the dark dreams of our fears.” Although she felt guilty about leaving her friends and colleagues behind, Dawidowicz was able to return to the United States shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland on September 2, 1939.

During World War II, Dawidowicz lived in New York City and worked as a researcher and archivist at the newly established American branch of the YIVO. The Vilna branch of the institute was taken over first by the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic; later, in 1941, the German army occupied Vilna. During the German occupation of the city, many of YIVO’s precious books and manuscripts were confiscated. Although a major portion of the collection was transported to Germany, numerous books and documents were destroyed. Some materials were saved from destruction by Polish Jews such as the poet Abraham Sutzkever, who hid portions of the archives in the Jewish ghettos in Vilna.

Desperate to learn the fate of her friends, Dawidowicz was horrified to hear of the methodical extermination of Polish Jews once this news became public. During the war, she had immersed herself in the study of Yiddish literature and Jewish history in the hope that she could help preserve Jewish culture as a legacy to the postwar world. An opportunity to put her knowledge to use arose in 1946, when the New York branch of YIVO learned that all the collections of Judaica found in Germany had been deposited in Offenbach, near Frankfurt. The Office of Military Government of the United States (OMGUS) had been given responsibility for these collections, which were cataloged and administered by a section of OMGUS known as Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. It was the task of this office to advise the military on how best to ensure the security of such valuable properties, to protect them from further deterioration, and to identify their rightful owners.

Dawidowicz returned to Europe in 1946 ostensibly to work with Jewish survivors in Munich, Germany, then under the administration of U.S. occupation forces. She was appointed to the position of education officer with the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Her work eventually led her to the Judaica collections held in Offenbach. In 1947, the YIVO in New York was informed that the Vilna YIVO collection was to be placed under its ownership and care. Dawidowicz was then appointed by the New York YIVO to coordinate with OMGUS to identify and prepare the “orphaned” volumes, documents, and photographs for shipment to the United States. By the end of May, 1947, cases of materials originally belonging to the Vilna YIVO were sent to New York.

On her return to the United States in 1948, Dawidowicz married Szymon M. Dawidowicz, a refugee who had been an activist with the socialist Jewish Labor Bund in Poland. For the next twenty-one years, Lucy Dawidowicz worked as a research analyst and was named research director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the oldest Jewish defense organization in the United States. At the AJC, she was instrumental in sponsoring scientific studies on prejudice and anti-Semitism. During these years, she had time to complete her master’s degree at Columbia University. She also cowrote Politics in a Pluralist Democracy (1963) with L. J. Goldstein and coedited the essay collection For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature and Society (1964). After leaving the AJC in 1969, Dawidowicz joined the faculty of Yeshiva University in New York City, where she served as a professor of social history and was named to two special chairs as professor of Holocaust studies from 1970 to 1978.

A turning point in Dawidowicz’s scholarly life occurred in 1967, with the publication of The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, an anthology of individual memoirs and personal documents that she edited. Her introductory historical essay to this collection poignantly conjured up the lost world of Eastern European Jewry before the Holocaust. It was a powerful work, amplifying and reconstructing the past.

Dawidowicz was not satisfied, however, with merely reconstructing the nostalgic past. She felt compelled to assess the historical impact of the Holocaust. In 1975, she published The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 , which won the Anisfield-Wolf prize in 1976 and was translated into Hebrew, French, German, and Japanese. In this influential work, Dawidowicz argued that the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis was not merely incidental to World War II; the Nazis’ racial ideology, with its stated intention to eliminate every Jew, was an end in itself. The following year saw the publication of Dawidowicz’s A Holocaust Reader (1976).

Many other historians were also involved in interpreting the Holocaust, assessing its importance in human history. Certain historians focused on the particular role of the Jewish community during the Holocaust. There were historians who blamed the Jews for the catastrophe, claiming either that the Jews were collectively passive or that Jewish communal organizations had collaborated with the Nazis to bring about their fate. Others blamed American Jews for their lack of prompt reaction to news of the Holocaust and their failure to act decisively to pressure the United States and its allies to intervene on behalf of European Jews. To place her own interpretation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in perspective, Dawidowicz wrote The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History (1977) and The Holocaust and the Historians (1981). In this latter work, she categorically repudiated any indictments of Jewish historical blindness, cowardice, or complicity in their own destruction. Although there were scholars who contested her interpretation, Dawidowicz held firmly to her convictions and continued to do battle with her critics in the pages of Commentary magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and various academic publications.

As one of the founders of Holocaust studies in the United States, Dawidowicz was invited to teach and give special lectures at several universities during the 1970’s and 1980’s. During this same period, she was awarded several honorary doctorates and won a number of prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976. She was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to serve on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust from 1978 to 1979, and she served on the board of directors of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. Her husband, Szymon, died in 1979, and Dawidowicz died in New York City in 1990 at the age of seventy-five.

Significance

Dawidowicz distinguished herself as an author and professor of Holocaust studies. A first-generation Jewish American woman scholar, she had a special affinity for her Polish heritage and feared that the wartime extermination of numerous Eastern European Jews might extinguish their unique thousand-year-old culture as well. In her writings, she sought to keep alive the spark of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

Her scholarly focus on the fate of Jews and Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during World War II remains a vital part of the ongoing debate about the origins and expression of bigotry, violence, and destruction in the twentieth century. Although her work came under critical attack during her later years, Dawidowicz was recognized as a serious scholar, a meticulous researcher, and a passionate seeker after moral truth.

Although she was among the first Jewish women of her generation to excel in the academic world and to achieve acclaim in a long career, Dawidowicz did not identify herself as a feminist. Unlike other prominent Jewish women, she did not lend her voice to the American feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Turning from these secular concerns, she instead became increasingly more orthodox in religion and even wrote in defense of the Orthodox Jewish practice of separate seating for men and women in the synagogue. Nevertheless, her dedication and her contributions to scholarship set a vibrant example for the generation of women who followed.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Richard. “Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Seventy-five, Scholar of Jewish Life and History, Dies.” The New York Times, December 6, 1990, p. B12. Describes Dawidowicz’s role in Holocaust studies and lauds her for her excellent scholarship and profound moral impact.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. This memoir traces Dawidowicz’s experiences at YIVO in Vilna before the war through her escape from Poland and her postwar return to Eastern Europe to retrieve books and archival materials. Her emotions and her intellectual judgments are portrayed with passion and clarity.

Dubkowski, Michael. “Anti-Semitism.” In Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, edited by Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker. New York: Garland, 1992. This article gives historical background about anti-Semitism and sets Dawidowicz’s concepts alongside those of other twentieth century scholars.

Kozodoy, Neal. “In Memoriam: Lucy S. Dawidowicz.” Commentary 93 (May, 1992): 35-40. In addition to describing her personal life and career, this obituary traces Dawidowicz’s intellectual development and discusses the political implications of her views regarding Nazi responsibility for the Holocaust.

Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987. In his comprehensive assessment of modern Holocaust historiography, Marrus places Dawidowicz’s ideas about Hitler’s “final solution” in the context of other historians’ interpretations.

Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil. New York: Random House, 1998. Rosenbaum examines how historians and others have explained Hitler’s monumental evil and the Holocaust, providing a chapter on Dawidowicz’s perspective.