Singed by History: Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Join Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies for a webinar with Nancy Sinkoff, who will discuss her new book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020). The book is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. This lecture will focus on Dawidowicz’s view of Polish-Jewish relations, which was informed by her fateful year living in Vilna, Poland, in 1938-1939, experience working with refugee scholars at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City during the war, and the all-encompassing culture of the Cold War. All these components shaped her historiographic perspective on writing the history of the destruction of East European Jewry.

About the Speaker
Sinkoff is a professor of Jewish studies and history at Rutgers University, where she serves as the academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life. She is the author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), which has recently been reissued digitally with a new preface, and Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (University of Rochester Press, 2018), which won the outstanding book prize from the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society.

Sinkoff is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including 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. From 2016-2017, she was the Elizabeth J. Dilworth Fellow in Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.