Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz is an historian American, born the June 16th 1915 and died the December 5th 1990 in New York.

Biography

It is the girl of max and Dora Schildkret, Jews detached of the religious practice. It makes studies of English literature in Hunter College, where it obtains in 1936 its baccalaureat, then since 1937 with the Université Columbia where it continues its studies in English literature to obtain a master, but it will not go at the end of its studies in literature because, impressed by the events which shook Europe then, it decides to choose another subject of research. It takes the advice of Shatzky Jacob, historian specialist in history of the Poland, and chooses the history of the Jews.

Lucy Schildkret has some hesitations, dependant on the radical character of this change of orientation and to the prospects limited to find work then, but it ends up lining up in this opinion. She studies Judaïté European one year in Columbia, then share in 1937 like doctorante at the scientific Institute Yiddish, with Vilnius, city which belongs then to the Poland. She undertakes to it research with the three directors of the Institute: Max Weinreich, Zelig Kalmanovich, and Zalmen Reisen - of which only the first survives the Shoah; it will found the scientific Institute later Yiddish of New York. These meetings mark it for all its existence. They are however rather short, since Lucy Schildkret returns to the the United States in August 1939.

From 1940 to 1946, it is assistant of the scientific director of the scientific Institute Yiddish of New York, where it meets her husband-to-be, Szymon Dawidowicz, Pole Jewish who fled the invasion Nazi. During these years, it follows by the press the evolution of persecutions Nazis, but without completely taking conscience of the hugeness of the Shoah until the release of the extermination and concentration camps. She marries Szymon Dawidowicz in 1948; he dies in 1979.

Since 1946, it turns over in Europe to come to assistance of the displaced persons and refugees, as representing teaching of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, main organization Community of the Jewish Americans of assistance to the Jews living apart from the United States. She will also fight to recover the books which had been stolen library of the scientific Institute Yiddish of Vilnius during the war.

From 1948 to 1969, it is in charge of research then research director to the American Jewish Committee (American Jewish Committee), main organization of the Jews in the United States. She is then professor with the Yeshiva University (1969-1975), with the Université Stanford (1975-1981) and at the university of Syracuse (New York) (1980).

In 1985, joining again with its first literary interests, it sets up Funds for the translation into English of the Jewish literature in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz contributes regularly to the review Commentary (as from 1951), with the NewYork Times Book Review , with the NewYork Times Magazine , the Times Literary Supplement , and with This World .

Work and standpoint

Lucy S. Dawidowicz mainly worked on the history of the Jews, the history of the Antisémitisme, the Shoah and the elections American.

Its more important work - and only which either translated into French - is The War against the Jews ( the War against the Jews ), history general of Shoah published in 1975 and crowned by the Anisfeld-Wolf price. It supplemented this study with has Holocaust Reader , collection with accompanying notes of documents, published in 1976, then The Holocaust and the Historians ( Historians and Shoah ), historiographic study published in 1981.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz lines up resolutely among the intentionnalists, i.e. among the historians considering that Adolf Hitler formed the project to destroy Jewish Europeans before the release of the Second world war and not after, in 1941. According to Mrs. Dawidowicz, its general ideas on the Jews were stopped since 1920 ( the War against the Jews , ED. Hatchet, 1977, p. 39).

It defends also the single character of Shoah:

The Final solution overflowed the borders of the modern historical experiment. Never still the modern history had seen people making genocide of another people the crowning of an ideology for which the means practically merge with the ends. The history, certainly, recorded massacres and terrible destruction perpetrated by people on another, but all - for cruel and unjustifiable that they were - were adapted to fine practices. They was means adapted at a certain end and not of the ends sufficient to themselves.

the War against the Jews , p. 9.

For this reason Lucy S. Dawidowicz very highly criticized Ernst Nolte - for which Shoah is a simple counterpart with the crimes of Joseph Stalin, and does not present great originality -, then Arno J. Mayer, reproaching him for transforming Shoah into event second, simple consequence of the invasion of the USSR, like the pogroms perpetrated with 11th and 12th centuries were consequences second Croisades. She also denounced the negationnists.

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