This lecture will discuss Nancy Sinkoff's new book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life, and as vital link between the European and U.S. diasporas.

Nancy Sinkoff is Professor of Jewish Studies and History and the Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. She is author, most recently, of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History and the co-edited volume (with Rebecca Cypess), Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, winner of the outstanding book prize from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. Her first book, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, has recently been reissued digitally with a new preface by Brown Judaic Studies. Its protagonist, Mendel Lefin of Satanów, is part of the core exhibit, “Encounters with Modernity,” in Polin: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, on which Professor Sinkoff consulted.

Professor Sinkoff is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Mellon Foundation, the IIE Fulbright Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the Frankel Center at the University of Michigan, the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and the USC Shoah Foundation. In 2016-2017, she was the Elizabeth J. Dilworth Fellow in Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ.

Dr. Sinkoff holds a PhD from Columbia University’s Department of History.

Books can be purchased here.

Supported by the Kaye and Radov Families.

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