Abstract: | "Sinkoff's book is about the pivotal role played by Jewish American intellectuals in the postwar years, told through Lucy Dawidowicz's profoundly influential American Jewish life that was bookended by World War I and the fall of Soviet Communism and buffeted by Nazism and the murder of the Jews of Europe. Reared in a Yiddish-speaking socialist home committed to Jewish life in the diaspora, Dawidowicz dallied with Communism as a college student, became a staunch FDR Democrat in the 1930s, and then a committed liberal until the mid-1960s. Yet toward the end of her life, she identified as a neoconservative. Based on never-before used archives and oral interviews, From Left to Right argues that Dawidowicz's shift to the right was not predestined; it came out of the lived historical realities of prewar Poland, the trauma of watching the Holocaust unfold from New York, her work with Jewish refugees in postwar Germany, the creation of Holocaust consciousness-in which she played a major role-the rise of both Holocaust denial and antisemitism in the 1970s and 1980s, and her study of Jewish history. Indelibly shaped by Nazism and the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz's life intersected with the central issues and personalities that shaped Jewish life in the twentieth century, and her story fills an essential gap in Jewish intellectual history"-- |
