Sinkoff, Nancy. “From Left to Right: Lucy S. Daw­id­ow­icz, the New York Intel­lec­tu­als, and the Pol­i­tics of Jew­ish History”, Wayne State University Press, 2021.

The First Comprehensive Biography of Lucy Dawidowicz

Amos Lassen

Nancy Sinkoff’s “From Left to Right: Lucy S. Daw­id­ow­icz, the New York Intel­lec­tu­als, and the Pol­i­tics of Jew­ish History” is the first comprehensive biography of Lucy Dawidowicz (1915-1990). After World War II, Dawidowicz was a household both because of her scholarship and her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, had been a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat and then later championed neoconservatism. Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift came from having lived  in prewar Poland, then seeing the Holocaust take place but from from New York City and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Sinkoff bases her work on over forty-five archival collections and she chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a look at the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is the story of Dawidowicz’s childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 is about Dawidowicz’s formative European years in Poland, New York City and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still deep in her heart. It also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jews. In  Part 4, we see the division between Dawidowicz’s European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the changing definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s onward and the emergence of neoconservatism. There is also an interpretation of Dawidowicz’s memoir “From that Place and Time” and an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that show the reach of her work and person. 

Because of Dawidowicz’s right-wing politics, sex, and commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have caused her to be neglected by scholars. She stood out among the Jew­ish New York intel­lec­tu­als of the last cen­tu­ry declaring that a ​“sense of Jew­ish his­to­ry and des­tiny is what every Jew who cares about the sur­vival of his peo­ple feels in his bones.” She cared deeply about the future of Jew­ish life, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the wake of the destruc­tion of Jew­ish civ­i­liza­tion in Europe. She f chal­lenged the argu­ments of Han­nah Arendt and sev­er­al his­to­ri­ans and rejected con­tentions that the Holo­caust was what she called The War Against the Jews.

Because of fate, Daw­id­ow­icz was a wit­ness to the last days of Yid­dish cul­ture in East­ern Europe. She spent a year in her ear­ly twen­ties as a researcher and trans­la­tor at the YIVO Insti­tute for Jew­ish Research in Vil­na — a year that end­ed just as the Nazis invad­ed Poland. Her life’s work was shaped by her immer­sion in the reli­gion, cul­ture, and thought of East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ish civilization.

In “The Golden Tradition”, her first book, she wrote a col­lec­tion of source mate­ri­als exem­pli­fy­ing the ideas, pol­i­tics, intel­lec­tu­al cur­rents, and every­day life in that van­ished Jewish world. She chal­lenged the view that Yid­dish cul­ture could sur­vive as a sec­u­lar move­ment out­side the cul­tur­al enve­lope of East­ern Europe and she was deter­mined to pre­serve its lega­cy. She spent a year in Europe after the war, help­ing sal­vage thou­sands of Jew­ish books which oth­er­wise would like­ly have been lost.

In the decades when she worked for the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Com­mit­tee, it believed that human-rights leg­is­la­tion was the best way to pro­tect the inter­ests of Jews. Daw­id­ow­icz dis­agreed and urged advo­ca­cy for the spe­cif­ic inter­ests of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty as well. When the AJC favored a Holo­caust memo­r­i­al that would recall ​“out­rages against human­i­ty,” she argued that it should record ​“the dec­i­ma­tion of Jews.” “Only the parochial Jews wor­ried about what Hit­lerism meant for Jew­ish sur­vival. The uni­ver­sal­ists regard­ed Hitler as the last stage of impe­ri­al­ist capitalism.”

This book shows her intel­lec­tu­al path as a jour­ney to neo­con­ser­vatism but it risks dimin­ish­ing her forth­right inde­pen­dence as a thinker. Unlike many neoconservative intellectuals, how­ev­er, her val­ues were came out of the Jew­ish cul­ture of pre­war Vil­na, and the dev­as­ta­tion of that cul­ture by the Nazi Party.

Sinkoff gives profound insight into the American Jewish psyche by chronicling its diverse cultural proclivities and political sensibilities. She uses Dawidowicz to tell a larger story: the rise of Jewish political conservatism as a powerful force in American life from its roots in Yiddish progressive circles in New York.  Sinkoff shows how American Jewish politics came to be bound by memory and trauma of the gone world of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.

Dawidowicz’s life and career is a capsule of much of the Jewish experience since the time of World War II. She has angered the American Jewish community over the past seventy years. Often ignored by historians because she was a woman, Dawidowicz regains her rightful place in American Jewish history with this book. We see her as a study of contradictions— a bold female voice who rejected the “special pleading” of second-wave feminism, a dedicatee to Yiddish but rejected it as a basis for Jewish life. She was a frustrating, consternating political thinker who moved from far left in the 1930s to neoconservative in the 1980s.

Nancy Sinkoff ‘s biography. is well written and an information-filled look at t an important person and her growth and development and place in Jewish letters.

Krimstein, Ken. “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth”, Bloomsbury, 2018.

A Graphic Look at Hannah Arendt

Amos Lassen

Hannah Arendt was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought who was largely unsung and often misunderstood. She is best known for her landmark 1951 book on openness in political life, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” with its powerful and timely lessons that make it very relevant today.

Arendt led an extraordinary life. She endured Nazi persecution firsthand and survived harrowing “escapes” from country to country in Europe. She was a friend of such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, Marc Chagall, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. She was a woman who finally had to give up her unique genius for philosophy, and her love of a very compromised man (the philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger) for what she referred to as “love of the world.”

New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein’s brings us a strikingly illustrated portrait of a complex, controversial and courageous woman whose intelligence led her to brilliant insights into the human condition.

I am a huge fan of Arendt and was so when it was not the best time to be one. To be in the same room with Arendt was to be in a room with greatness and the few times that I was able to do so gave my life a whole new meaning. Ken Krimstein brings us a deeply moving graphic memoir about the life and thoughts of Arendt. We see clearly hear that through her words, Arendt taught us about how to live in the world, the meaning of freedom, the perils of totalitarianism, and our power as human beings to think about things and not just act blindly. There is a lot to know about Arendt and Krimstein explains her ideas clearly and with humor and in doing so we see why they still resonate.

She was an émigré intellectual who lived through dark times, leading a life of the mind. Krimstein turns a wartime adventure tale into a coming-of-age story, a graphic novel of ideas, a political biography, and a meditation on the importance of truth.

To some it might seem counterintuitive that Hannah Arendt who was known for her fiercely independent and pioneering philosophical writings, should be the subject of a cartoon biography, but Ken Krimstein shows that it could be respectfully done. He sends “a fundamental, crucial message regarding Arendt’s thinking about the world and the possibility of a recurrence of the thoughtless, meaningless evil of destruction that appeared in 20th century totalitarian regimes”.

Basically, this is a biographical work that stresses Arendt’s lifelong search for a way to understand the world around her. We look at Arendt through three escapes. Before he does this, he looks at the social trials of Arendt’s childhood and youth, the beginning of her need and desire to understand, and her infamous relationship with her professor/philosopher Martin Heidegger. Arendt’s three escapes include one from Berlin in 1933 after being arrested for doing research for a Zionist organization. Her second escape was from France in 1941 after she was able to get away from an internment camp during Germany’s invasion. Her third escape came while Arendt lived and worked in New York.

It is clear that Krimstein admires Arendt very much and takes a particular line in presenting her life and character. Heidegger seems to occupy Arendt’s thoughts too much and too long after they lost contact. Krimstein uses Heidegger to illustrate arguments that Arendt has with herself in later years. She gave us the phrase “the banality of evil,” and this is a very true way to look at human drive.

Krimstein is faithful to the known facts of Arendt’s life and certainly gives her a long overdue placement in the world of 20th century philosophers. “If she had done nothing else but contribute the concept of “the banality of evil” to our discourse, Arendt would have earned her place in our thinking processes… and, yes, as the book makes clear, she did much more.” Arendt was a complicated person and a complicated Jew in life and thought. Told from the perspective of Arendt herself, the book is a probing look at the many dimensions of fidelity to truth that she sought to uncover in humanity. We gain insight into the Arendtian perspective as well as a sense of its relevance to today. We must be “cognizant to not let demagogues and opportunists co-opt the democratic values that are essential to maintaining civil liberties.”