{"id":130303,"date":"2020-04-29T17:46:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T01:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303"},"modified":"2024-04-17T15:44:15","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T23:44:15","slug":"from-left-to-right-lucy-s-dawidowicz-the-new-york-intellectuals-and-the-politics-of-jewish-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303","title":{"rendered":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src=\"https:\/\/rumble.com\/embedJS\/uajap1\"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+\"\/?url=\"+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+\"&args=\"+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, \"script\", \"Rumble\");<\/script><\/p>\n<div id=\"rumble_vdmg7h\"><\/div>\n<p><script>\nRumble(\"play\", {\"video\":\"vdmg7h\",\"div\":\"rumble_vdmg7h\"});<\/script><\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Left-Right-Dawidowicz-Intellectuals-Politics\/dp\/0814345107\">Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>* &#8220;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or at least a qualification\u2014about the cohesion of the Jewish collectivity in modern Europe. In this pessimistic view, the liberal emancipatory state, which affirmed individual rights over the group, could not be hospitable to Jewish national claims.54 Baron also expressed severe reservations about the fate of the Jews in the context of the modern nation-state\u2019s drive toward ethnic homogeneity, concluding that \u201cthe status of the Jews was most favorable in pure states of nationalities (i.e., states in which several ethnic groups were included, none having the position of a dominant majority); least favorable in national states (i.e., where state and nationality, in the ethnic sense, were more or less identical); and varying between the two extremes in states which included only part of a nationality.\u201d55 This insight was not lost on Kalmanovitch and other Jewish intellectuals in interwar Poland, where supporters of Polish nationalism increasingly viewed the Jews as a foreign element alien to Polish society. Kalmanovitch concluded that the best option was a territorialist solution that allowed for the flourishing of an autonomous Jewish collectivity. <\/p>\n<p>* Antisemitism was the ever-present shadow enshrouding Lucy\u2019s Vilna year. The antisemitism she observed was not limited to disgruntled lower social classes but also permeated the most educated and elite strata of society.75 Writing about Polish antisemitism in From That Place and Time, she linked hooliganism with the university, uncoupling the liberal Enlightenment assumption that aspiration for broadened intellectual horizons meant an equally expansive conception of ethnic and civic toleration. The numerus clausus and the ghetto benches encouraged the view\u2014even among the country\u2019s \u201cenlightened\u201d professoriate and youth\u2014that Jews were not Poles. Indeed, Lucy noted, \u201cThe most zealous practitioners of hooliganism and the most reliable source of supply for hooligans were the students at the University of Vilna.\u201d76 In 1979 she recalled the part that the university elite played in demonizing the Jews in interwar Poland.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I remember the shock of my first encounter with that Polish nationalist anti-Semitism. It was just then the beginning of the school year and Polish university students were picketing a stationery store\u2014a Jewish stationery store\u2014which sold school supplies. The store was on one of Vilna\u2019s main streets. School children as well as adults who wanted to buy there were assaulted and even pedestrians walking by who looked Jewish were insulted and abused. . . . For me it was the first lesson in what would become a system of continuing political education: the university was no bulwark against prejudice and neither the study of philosophy nor the pursuit of literature would prove to be a defense against the sickness of bigotry and anti-Semitism.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>* In two articles for the New Leader, a socialist anti-communist paper sponsored by the Tamiment Institute, and one for Commentary, Dawidowicz condemned the Rosenbergs\u2019 actions and the tactics of the Committee to Secure Justice for the Rosenbergs, founded by the communist journalist William A. Reuben in 1952. Her positions were clear. The US government was not antisemitic; the guilty conviction of the Rosenbergs was deserved; and their punishment befitted the crime. They were unrepentant, she believed, not because they were innocent but because they desired to be communist martyrs. Had the Rosenbergs cherished their lives\u2014and their children\u2019s\u2014they could have pleaded guilty and plea-bargained, as did Morton Sobell.37 In \u201c \u2018Anti-Semitism\u2019 and the Rosenberg Case: The Latest Communist Propaganda Trap,\u201d Dawidowicz traced what she saw as the bald manipulation of American Jewish fears of antisemitism by communists, particularly by Jewish communists writing in both Yiddish and English.38 In her view, the claim that the Rosenbergs\u2019 \u201cJewishness\u201d informed their arrest and sentence had no foundation.<\/p>\n<p>* She remained skittish about the Jewish attraction to the Left throughout her life. In 1961 she wrote to John Slawson, noting that Nathan Glazer\u2019s The Social Basis of American Communism was perceptive about the party\u2019s appeal to Jews, but concluded that she was \u201cnot at all sure that its publication is particularly good for Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* Consistent with the AJC\u2019s default liberal optimism regarding conflicts between varying ethnic and religious minorities in the United States, the memo made clear that \u201cthe rising proportion of non-whites in our big cities\u2014Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans (i.e., Mexican Indians, for the most part)\u2014is not responsible for the woes of the metropolis.\u201d The crisis in cities began with poor planning that did not accommodate the rapid growth of the urban population, many of whom were poor, and that targeted nonwhite areas for urban redevelopment. The memo highlighted social class, race, and geography as a combustible trio leading up to the current urban malaise affecting, most prominently, Newark, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Segregated housing undermined educational opportunity for poor, inner-city nonwhites: \u201cBad neighborhoods had bad schools\u2014antiquated, hazardous and inadequate for the swelling school population.\u201d Yet civil rights solutions, such as voluntary school desegregation, had aroused public protests. So too had the strategy, urged by some black civil rights activists, for blacks to \u201cbuy black\u201d and boycott white establishments. The close contact and unequal social status between middle-class whites and lower-class nonwhites had unleashed acts of violence that, in turn, \u201chave intensified white hate, fear and prejudice.\u201d The memo recognized the special plight of nonwhites whose racial difference was a \u201cdouble burden\u201d compared to the discrimination faced by earlier urban immigrants. Still it warned that \u201cNegro Militancy\u201d nurtured by profound economic inequity held \u201cexplosive potential\u201d for conflict.<\/p>\n<p>The memo also underscored the problem of \u201cscapegoating.\u201d Scapegoating persisted because most Americans viewed African Americans and Puerto Ricans\u2014a minority group sometimes grouped with African Americans in the AJC\u2019s literature\u2014as a group, not as individuals, treating the sins of one as the sins of all. \u201cIt is a simple step from the stereotype of group behavior\u2014the notion that delinquency is characteristic of a group, whether for reasons of environment or of culture\u2014to the idea of collective guilt,\u201d which had to be avoided at all costs. Discrimination in housing, education, and employment; the use of negative imagery and stereotyping; and poor media coverage of intergroup relations were all characteristic parts of the Committee\u2019s work, but the memo urged the AJC and its chapters to push further to rectify these social ills.<\/p>\n<p>* Between 1920 and 1960, Jews constituted the city\u2019s largest \u201cethnic-religious\u201d element in New York City schools. At their highest numbers, 33 percent of all students and 45 percent of all teachers were Jews.<\/p>\n<p>* The cracks in northern Jewish support for civil rights grew from 1964 forward as American society imploded&#8230; In 1963, Murray Friedman published \u201cThe White Liberal\u2019s Retreat,\u201d tracing the worries of northern white liberals confronted with African American political demands on their own doorstep. \u201cNorthern migration has shifted the center of the race problem to the metropolitan areas of the North and West,\u201d Friedman wrote. \u201cThe Negro is no longer an abstraction to the white liberal but a concrete reality\u2014in many instances, a potential or actual next-door neighbor, a classmate of his child\u2019s, a coworker at office or workbench.\u201d97 The \u201cretreat\u201d of white liberals from the radicalizing civil rights movement, he concluded, was not simply a display of hypocrisy but reflected actual changed priorities on the part of middle-class liberal whites who had moved to the suburbs, chosen private over public education, and advocated for grouping or tracking students in classes based on performance. These decisions reflected the desire for upward mobility, societal security, and maintenance of educational standards, values that, while deeply ingrained in American society, served to reinforce color lines and further systemic racism.<\/p>\n<p>* The riots of the long hot summer of 1964, which targeted white-owned businesses, pointed to the gap between the leadership of the civil rights movement and the African American masses. While Martin Luther King Jr. condemned the looting of Jewish property in the Southern Israelite, pledging to uphold \u201cthe fair name of the Jews,\u201d the Jewish Telegraphic Agency estimated that 80 percent of the wrecked and looted businesses were owned by Jews. It was difficult to assess how much of the violence had been directed at Jews as Jews or as whites.<\/p>\n<p>* The Cold War\u2019s depiction of the Soviet Union as both totalitarian and godless shaped the ways in which postwar American culture positioned religious practice as the linchpin of a healthy democracy. Defining the Jews as a religious group, not a national one, the AJC\u2019s leadership believed that the Jews\u2019 best interests were served not by special Jewish pleading but by making the civic sphere religiously pluralistic, a process that both abetted the secularization of postwar American public life and allowed for Jewish religious distinctiveness. The AJC\u2019s religious definition of Jewishness married harmoniously with Cold War liberalism\u2019s affirmation of religion as a bulwark against the compulsory atheism of communism. Liberal Catholics and Protestants welcomed Jews as an equal partner in the postwar construction of the Judeo-Christian tradition, viewing it as a fundamental component of the American democratic ethos.<\/p>\n<p>But defending Judaism as a religious foot soldier in the battle against atheistic totalitarianism was different from asserting that it belonged in the public sphere. Earlier than most of her AJC peers, Dawidowicz challenged the liberal organization\u2019s assumption that the Jewish community\u2019s best interests were served by an iron wall of separation between church and state.<\/p>\n<p>* In her memo to John Slawson on July 25, 1960, Dawidowicz expressed concerns with the absolute separation of church and state, challenging a cardinal position of the AJC. \u201cWe speak always of the Jews as one of the three great religious groups in America,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe stress the religious rather than the ethnic or cultural character of the Jewish group. Yet we consistently\u2014inconsistently, to be correct\u2014take secularist positions on matters affecting church-state relations.\u201d18 In support of her claims, Dawidowicz referred to her earlier December 1959 paper, \u201cThe Jewish Position on Released Time and Bible Reading.\u201d The twenty-eight-page memo surveyed the history of the American Jewish communal opposition to any forms of religious education in the public schools. It noted that only the Hasidim consistently supported measures that would allow Jewish parents to educate their children in Judaism on public time and in public space. She qualified the opinion that strict separationism was ultimately in the Jewish interest and provided evidence of successful release time programs that benefited the Jewish community by providing religious instruction to highly assimilated Jewish youth with no or little Jewish educational background. She cautioned that Jewish opposition to Bible reading could backfire. Arguing that most Americans felt completely comfortable with some short reading of scriptural passages in the schools, she noted that \u201cJews seem[ing] to be the only important religious group contesting Bible reading may create an undesirable impression.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* In the spring of 1963, Dawidowicz sent a memo to Milton Himmelfarb, \u201cList of Examples Where Church and State Are Not Firmly Established.\u201d The list included \u201c1. personal status, such as marriage ceremonies and baptismal records; 2. the Federal hiring and salarying of chaplains; 3. the participation of clergy in public ceremonies, such as inaugurations, as well as the use of a Bible for official ceremonies; and 4. Federal aid for a whole host of religious purposes.\u201d She noted that religious institutions were exempt from federal taxes. Federal money through the National School Lunch Act supported school lunch programs for the poor, whether in public, private, or parochial schools. Hospitals and other welfare agencies run under religious auspices regularly received federal grants-in-aid. The G.I. Bill, providing veterans with low-cost educational loans, did not distinguish between religious and nonreligious institutions. From her personal experience working with the JDC after the war, she noted that sectarian agencies had played a major role in postwar reconstruction, providing direct and indirect support: \u201cSurplus commodities, free transportation, cooperation with American military forces are the most important instances.\u201d21 Her list made her position clear: the AJCs\u2019s dogmatic view of the inviolable wall separating church from state had to be rethought in light of the glaring inconsistencies in the way the First Amendment had been interpreted and applied in actual federal and state programs. Furthermore, in her view, the complete divorce of issues of \u201cchurch\u201d and \u201cstate\u201d was impossible for the Jews, whose ethnic and cultural bonds inherently blurred the distinction between the two spheres.<\/p>\n<p>* Recognizing the \u201cvariety among Americans about the role of religion in society and a desire to take account of these differences in some suitable civic arrangement,\u201d Dawidowicz urged a less separationist interpretation of the First Amendment. She suggested \u201cShared Time\u201d programs and the exemption of Saturday Sabbath observers from the Sunday closing law as possible solutions to the current stalemate between Americans who wanted more religion in the public sphere and those who feared its influence. Dawidowicz emphasized that new conceptions of civic pluralism required increased tolerance of religious difference and observed that even stalwart Jewish separationists were changing their views: \u201cThe once seemingly monolithic Jewish position advocating the complete separation of church from state and of religion from society seems to show signs of breaking down.\u201d As proof, she adduced the fact that the entire rabbinate, not merely the Orthodox, had begun to seek federal aid for Jewish schools.<\/p>\n<p>* In a memo to AJC staffer Anne Wolfe in March 1965, Dawidowicz summed up the work she had done on church-state matters, wryly noting that the Jewish position on federal aid was simple: only Orthodox Jews are in favor. \u201cAll other Jewish organizations, except the AJC (and I still don\u2019t understand that one), appear not to be interested either in Jewish education or any education for that matter. They just want to make sure the Catholics do not get a penny.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* Historians have generally attributed the American Jewish communal elites\u2019 \u201cinward\u201d turn to the years after 1967, spurred by the rise of Black Power, the threat to Israel\u2019s existence evidenced by the Six-Day War, and the rise in Holocaust consciousness.56 Yet Dawidowicz\u2019s internalist turn began much earlier. Even before 1967, she had already begun to pull back from the liberal Jewish consensus that characterized so many of her peers in New York City and at the American Jewish Committee. In many ways, the men who would later become prominent neoconservatives were just catching up with her. Her coworkers at the AJC, such as Milton Himmelfarb, Nathan Perlmutter, and Norman Podhoretz, were already well aware of Dawidowicz\u2019s reassessment of Jewish liberalism as well as of her capacious knowledge of and commitment to Jewish life. But it would take the publication of her first major book, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, written in the last years of her AJC tenure, to bring her personality, worldview, and erudition to the general public\u2019s eye.<\/p>\n<p>* Even without a formal kahal (the Jewish municipality or institution of self-government in Europe) to compel Jewish group identity, postwar American Jews felt a sense of community, and their electoral choices both reflected and maintained those communal bonds. Dawidowicz\u2019s research affirmed her belief that Jewish communal life was a source of Jewish national, political, and spiritual vitality.<\/p>\n<p>The AJC, however, had to walk a tightrope between affirming Jewish communal life and its values and preventing the perception that those values created a \u201cgroup\u201d political stance, which could lead to anti-Jewish discrimination. In fact, at a Domestic Affairs Committee meeting in September 1960, concern was voiced about the upcoming presidential election and the prospect of anti-Catholicism harming Kennedy\u2019s candidacy7 and about an article in the New York Times that alluded to the existence of a Jewish voting \u201cbloc.\u201d8 The meeting\u2019s minutes called the article \u201cdeplorable,\u201d criticizing \u201cthe kind of loose talk about an alleged Jewish vote that has been a part of every election campaign since 1940.\u201d They also noted that only in the case of a \u201cdemonstrably anti-Semitic\u201d candidate would the AJC counsel \u201clegitimate Jewish partisanship,\u201d stressing that the Committee\u2019s public mission disavowed any specific Jewish group \u201cinterest\u201d except combating anti-Jewish discrimination.<\/p>\n<p>* Dawidowicz positioned her interpretation against the historians known as \u201cfunctionalists.\u201d Broadly speaking, their view, as evidenced in the work of the German historians Uwe Adam, Hans Mommsen, G\u00f6tz Aly, and Martin Broszat, was that the Final Solution was not a product of one man\u2019s ideological fervor but rather the evolutionary product of competing Nazi bureaucracies during the expansion of the Nazi war effort into Russian territory.34 The functionalists viewed totalitarianism, not antisemitism, as Nazi Germany\u2019s fundamental problem. In this reading, the victimization of the Jews was a by-product of National Socialism\u2019s push toward the creation of a homogeneous ethnic state. Ideology, for the functionalists, was at best merely instrumental.<\/p>\n<p>The interpretations against which Dawidowicz found herself most in contention were those of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt. In fact, she conceptualized The War Against the Jews as an argument against Hilberg\u2019s pathbreaking study of the Nazi bureaucratic machine, The Destruction of the European Jews, and Arendt\u2019s Eichmann in Jerusalem, works she viewed as the first texts of the functionalist school in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>* The deteriorating relationship between Hilberg and Dawidowicz can be traced in their personal correspondence, book reviews, and memoirs.1 The two died, respectively, in 2007 and 1990, and today their defining books, The Destruction of the European Jews and The War Against the Jews, are read primarily as exemplars of \u201cold school\u201d Holocaust historiography, with Hilberg seen as the quintessential functionalist and master of perpetrator history and Dawidowicz as the foremost proponent of intentionalism. While Hannah Arendt continues to spark intellectual inquiry\u2014as evidenced by monographs, conferences, and symposia devoted to her oeuvre; a 2012 biopic, Hannah Arendt; a 2015 documentary, Vita Activa; and an opera, The Hat, about her first meeting with Martin Heidegger2\u2014Lucy S. Dawidowicz\u2019s persona and work have largely fallen by the intellectual and public wayside.<\/p>\n<p>The relative status of Dawidowicz\u2019s and Arendt\u2019s public reception today presents a reversal of the 1960s and 1970s, when Arendt\u2019s star dimmed and Dawidowicz\u2019s rose. Their oscillating reputations, along with their conflicting perspectives on the destruction of European Jewry and on the Jewish response to Nazism, have mirrored long-standing debates among Jewish intellectuals grappling with the security and vulnerability of the Jews in the modern world.3 At stake were questions about whether Jews should maintain principal loyalties to fellow Jews or embrace the universalist perspective of the Enlightenment; whether they should assimilate and pursue individual freedom or maintain a distinctive collective and national identity; and whether they had genuine allies within gentile society or needed to rely exclusively on Jewish modes of political life. Though these questions had been posed already in the late eighteenth century, they resonated acutely among the New York intellectuals, who struggled to find a balance between their commitments to universalist and particularist values as they integrated into American culture.4<\/p>\n<p>The New York intellectuals\u2019 enthusiastic reception, and then rejection, of Arendt\u2019s person and thought and their subsequent turn to Dawidowicz can be read not merely as a response to their internalization of the horror of the Holocaust but also as a marker of their faith\u2014or lack thereof\u2014in total assimilation&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>Given their rush to acculturate, it is no wonder that the New York intellectuals were enthralled with Hannah Arendt. Arriving in New York during their cosmopolitan peak, she perfectly represented their aspirations and values in numerous ways. Born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, Arendt studied at the Universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, writing a dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine\u2019s thought. Fleeing Germany after Hitler came to power, she went to Paris, where she did social work for Youth Aliyah, and in 1941 escaped to the United States, where she was granted entry through a limited visa program for German intellectuals. She quickly mastered English and within two years was writing for a host of English-language journals, both Jewish and general, including Jewish Social Studies, Partisan Review, and The Nation.22 Working as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations and as chief editor of Schocken Books from 1945 to 1951, she was also associated in varying capacities with Salo W. Baron\u2019s Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. But Arendt\u2019s passion was for the intellectual life of reading, writing, and teaching.23 Writing for Partisan Review was the union card necessary to being considered a New York intellectual, and Arendt, though a late arrival and female, was soon welcomed into what Norman Podhoretz called \u201cThe Family.\u201d24 Her pathbreaking book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, founded a whole school of thinking that viewed Nazism and Soviet communism as analogous forms of state terror and secured her place among the New York intellectuals. The book touched a particular chord, outlining the threat to individual freedom posed by these two monstrous twentieth-century state systems whose bureaucracies institutionalized state terror in the form of the Nazi death camp or the Gulag. Arendt became a fixture in the academy, teaching at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Wesleyan University, and the New School for Social Research.<br \/>\n      Literate, engaged with politics and high culture, and herself a product of the modern German culture so coveted by the New York intellectuals, Arendt personified the cosmopolitan ideal in which Jewishness and universal culture were a seamless whole. Richard Wolin, assessing Arendt\u2019s protean German-Jewish identity, has remarked that the ferocity of attachments and attacks on Arendt illustrates the \u201cprofound intellectual magnetism she must have exuded.\u201d25 Steven Aschheim has explained that her appeal reflected \u201cher capacity to integrate Jewish matters into the eye of the storm of world history, to make them explanatory factors in the great catastrophes of twentieth-century history\u201d\u2014and in so doing, to provide \u201ca kind of dignity and importance to a previously marginalized, even derided, existence.\u201d26<br \/>\n      As a German-Jewish cosmopolitan intellectual, Arendt commanded intellectual and cultural \u201ccapital\u201d for the East European Jewish New York intellectuals. Yet these factors alone do not explain the ease with which she was accepted by them. Arendt also possessed a kind of sexual agency or power that captivated many of these male intellectuals; she had \u201cfeminine\u201d or \u201csexual\u201d capital.27 In New York Jew, Alfred Kazin wrote evocatively of his friendship with Hannah and her husband, Heinrich Bl\u00fccher, recalling his first meeting with them at a Commentary dinner in the fall of 1947, where he had been \u201centhralled [by Hannah], by no means unerotically.\u201d28 Richard Cook, Kazin\u2019s biographer, remarked that \u201cKazin was crazy about her, even in an erotic sense,\u201d and that he described how \u201che blushed with pleasure holding her arm on the subway.\u201d29 Kazin told his young fianc\u00e9e, Ann Birstein, whom he once abandoned in the balcony of a lecture hall so he could sit in the orchestra with the object of his infatuation, that he could not love her if she did not love Arendt.30 Diana Trilling recalled that Arendt was attracted to her husband, Lionel Trilling, and \u201cmade believe that I did not exist even when we were a few feet apart, staring into each other\u2019s faces.\u201d31 Irving Howe, looking back in his autobiography, recalled that \u201cWhile far from \u2018good-looking\u2019 in any commonplace way, Hannah Arendt was a remarkably attractive person, with her razored gestures, imperial eye, dangling cigarette.\u201d He noted, too, that Arendt \u201cmade an especially strong impression on intellectuals\u2014those who, as mere Americans, were dazzled by the immensities of German philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>        &#8220;But I always suspected that she impressed people less through her thought than the style of her thinking. She bristled with intellectual charm, as if to reduce everyone in sight to an alert discipleship. Her voice would shift register abruptly, now stern and admonitory, now slyly tender in gossip. Whatever room she was in Hannah filled through the largeness of her will; indeed, she always seemed larger than her setting. Rarely have I met a writer with so acute an awareness of the power to overwhelm.&#8221;32<\/p>\n<p>      Her allure resulted in two marriages and what we now know was a lifelong love affair with her philosophy professor at Heidelburg, Martin Heidegger.33 Arendt\u2019s sexual confidence could be felt by men and women in her circle.34<br \/>\n      Then came Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book\u2019s publication in 1963 and the controversy it enflamed were part of the process by which the cosmopolitan New York intellectuals began a reassessment of Jewish concerns and, in some cases, a renewed commitment to them. To many of the New York intellectuals of Jewish origin, Eichmann in Jerusalem constituted a perverse moral inversion: the absolution of an arch-Nazi and a crude blaming of his victims. Arendt\u2019s accusation that the Jewish communal leadership had aided the Nazis\u2014when coupled with her German-Jewish dismissal of the East European Jewish background of the defense attorneys and her damning side comments about the irritations of modern Hebrew and the foreign quality of Israeli society\u2014seemed to give the lie to Arendt\u2019s claim that her book was merely a trial report. Clearly it was much more: a referendum on Jewish history and identity.35 For the New York intellectuals, the book challenged their universalist assumptions and punctured their long-held fantasies of the superiority of German culture.<br \/>\n      Arendt and Dawidowicz represented the two streams of the same historical-cultural process by which Ashkenazic Jewry\u2014western and eastern, respectively\u2014had negotiated its entry into the modern world. Symbolizing opposing positions on the relationship between universalism and Jewish particularism, they triggered different receptions among the New York intellectuals as they grappled with the major existential and political questions facing western Jewry in the twentieth century. Dan Diner has categorized Arendt\u2019s perspective on the destruction of European Jewry as part of a \u201cWestern Jewish narrative,\u201d which took the individual and her break with community and tradition as a starting point.36 The \u201cEastern Jewish narrative,\u201d in contrast, was constructed upon a basis of collective, national experience that assumed the existence of and ties to a people. Gershon Hundert described the worldview that shaped this narrative as a mentalit\u00e9. Polish Jewry was secure in itself and experienced \u201celemental continuities that persist[ed] from the early modern period almost to the present.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Enter Lucy S. Dawidowicz as the personification of this \u201cEastern Jewish narrative.\u201d With their turn toward Jewish particularist concerns, the New York intellectuals discovered Dawidowicz and the world of their fathers: not the world of Berlin but rather that of Warsaw, \u0141\u00f3d\u017a, Minsk, and Vilna or of one of the hundreds of market towns, shtetlakh, that defined the Jewish landscape of Eastern Europe. In the voluminous literature on the Eichmann controversy, Dawidowicz\u2019s The War Against the Jews, 1933\u20131945, published twelve years after Arendt\u2019s book, generally falls out of the historiography on the New York intellectuals. Yet it was a signal text in their reconceptualization of the balance between universalism and particularism.<br \/>\n      Dawidowicz was unknown to the New York intellectuals in their cosmopolitan peak in part because of her age. Born in 1915, she was only fifteen years old when Partisan Review first appeared.38 Moreover, she only briefly shared their fervor for universalism. And she was not considered an object of sexual desire. The immigrant sons distanced themselves not only from the cultural world of their fathers but also from the domestic world of their mothers.39<br \/>\n      Whereas Arendt represented the unattainable German-Jewish ideal, intellectually and sexually, Dawidowicz initially represented the attainable, but unattractive, East European archetype. Maleness and male sexuality were the tickets of admission to the New York intellectuals\u2019 group.40 Only the comeliest women gained entry into the group\u2014Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Diana Trilling, and, much later, Susan Sontag\u2014and then only one woman at a time. As Norman Podhoretz commented in Making It, there could be only one \u201cDark Lady\u201d of American letters, and she had to be \u201cclean, learned, good-looking, capable of writing family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness.\u201d41 Dawidowicz lacked the academic pedigree, the universalist bona fides, and the requisite \u201cfeminine capital\u201d to be accepted into the inner circle.42 She herself felt insecure about her physical attractiveness. Her private papers reveal her disparaging comments about her own looks, height, and general lack of sexual appeal.43 Dawidowicz married at thirty-three, late by the standards of the time. Her husband, Szymon, was twenty years her senior, and while she adored him, and the few letters between them express ardor, Dawidowicz kept a strong wall between her personal life and her scholarship. With no public sexual allure, she could not captivate the attention of the male New York intellectuals.<\/p>\n<p>* Dawidowicz\u2019s rejection of feminism came from her hostility to utopian politics and her concern with the content of Jewish identity that she felt guaranteed her people\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n<p>Dawidowicz\u2019s anti-feminism set her apart from some of her female friends. In 1985, Marie Syrkin addressed the tension between the individualism of feminism and the collectivism of Jewish national movements in her Midstream essay \u201cDoes Feminism Clash with Jewish National Need?\u201d Dawidowicz\u2019s rejoinder concluded that second-wave feminism clashed with Jewish national needs because it bore all the signs of the exclusivist vanguardism of earlier revolutionary movements. Feminists were willing to run roughshod over the Jewish common good in order to realize single-minded, separatist goals. Pointedly, she wrote to Joel Carmichael, Midstream\u2019s editor, \u201cFeminism is actually intellectually tiresome, since it is utterly without ideas. It\u2019s really only a politics of resentment. I wrote this piece only to show my respect for Marie.\u201d76 Moreover, sex for Dawidowicz was a private matter, and she rejected second-wave feminism\u2019s assumption that male and female needs were inherently antagonist. The essential binary for Dawidowicz was \u201cJew\u201d and \u201cnon-Jew.\u201d Her primary loyalty was to the Jewish people, not to her sex.<\/p>\n<p>* Among her friends and like-minded colleagues, \u201cOn Being a Woman in Shul\u201d was very well received.88 Even Michael A. Meyer, an ordained Reform rabbi and professional historian of German Jewry, found himself in agreement with her conclusions and shared with Dawidowicz an essay he had written as a student at Hebrew Union College in the early 1960s.89 Hardly part of the neoconservative camp, Meyer was concerned with the vitality of non-Orthodox Judaism and argued that the breakdown of gender distinctiveness in liberal Judaism had resulted in passionless, feminized services. What was missing was the \u201crelease of emotion we find in the Hasidic Shul and we nostalgically long for it in our own congregations.\u201d90 Reform Judaism had to \u201cregain its virility,\u201d and its rabbis needed to \u201cput back into [their] ministry the masculinity of hard logical thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dawidowicz\u2019s essay, and her exchanges with Meyer and other American Jewish intellectuals over the challenges of creating a vital liberal Judaism, formed part of a continuum of Jewish intellectual debate over the competitive pull of Enlightenment values, including gender equality,92 with the equally powerful force of Jewish survival in the modern world. Dawidowicz chose survival over liberalism. Yet in her turn to Jewish practice, she was quintessentially modern and American. Pushed by Carole Kessner to explain her partial embrace of Jewish ritual, Dawidowicz admitted that she was incapable of adopting certain practices, such as \u201cthe counting of the Omer\u201d between Passover and Shavuot\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t even know what that means.\u201d She continued, \u201cWhen people ask what kind of a Jew I am\u2014Orthodox, Conservative, Reform\u2014I joke and answer that I belong to the Selective branch of Judaism. I love the Orthodox service; nothing else will satisfy me, but I observe only what makes sense to me.\u201d93 Moreover, despite her rejection of the feminization of Jewish ritual and of feminism itself, Dawidowicz was aware of her singularity as often being the only woman at scholarly and board meetings or on the roster for public lectures. Speaking with the alumni of Yeshiva University\u2019s rabbinic school in 1971, she thought to begin her remarks, though she later excised them, by noting her sex, warning the \u201cgentlemen\u201d in her audience that \u201cyou may be in trouble for talking overmuch with women.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* When William Styron gave literary expression to Christian Polish suffering in his best-selling novel Sophie\u2019s Choice, Dawidowicz, among other Jewish intellectuals, was outraged.22 She resisted the universalization of the Holocaust with every fiber of her being and could not countenance the book\u2019s focus on gentile Polish victimhood as a representation of the catastrophe. All the dedications of her major works invoked the destruction of European Jewry.23 Her intense identification with the Polish Jewish victims of Vilna and Warsaw meant that she never forgave the Polish Christian population for its behavior under German occupation, whether as bystanders or collaborators. Yet her negative assessment of Sophie\u2019s Choice owed just as much to her view that Styron\u2019s novel was making a leftist political statement, promoting a universalism that shared the New Left\u2019s bias against Jewish cultural distinctiveness.<\/p>\n<p>* Dawidowicz\u2019s post-1982 position rejecting all public criticism of the Israeli government pitted her against many friends. Her letters from the last decade of her life express her new opinion on the limits of American Jewish dissent on Israel\u2019s policies and her decision to disengage from relationships with former friends whom she now viewed as political opponents.46 In October 1983, she informed Leon Wieseltier that since the war in Lebanon, \u201cI prefer the company of like-minded people,\u201d a comment that \u201crankled him.\u201d47 Lore Segal, the refugee novelist who was part of the coterie of Dawidowicz\u2019s female Jewish writer friends, was unable to win back her favor after they disagreed about politics.48 Her correspondence with the two lodestars of the New York intellectuals, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, illustrates the hardening of her position.<\/p>\n<p>* A child of the 1930s, when ideological passions ran high and so much was at stake, Dawidowicz, a \u201cquasi-survivor,\u201d in her own words, now considered the security, vitality, and autonomy of Jewish collective existence a nonnegotiable component of her identity. By the early 1980s, she had cast her lot with Jewish neoconservatism because she believed its adherents would not tolerate anti-Jewish hatred or bargain with Israel\u2019s future.62 As she had earlier articulated to Irving Howe, Dawidowicz now believed that Israel represented \u201cthe embodiment of the Jewish people and concentration of a Jewish cultural and political center.\u201d63 Defending it was an act of diaspora nationalist honor, necessary to protect from the left flank within the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<p>* In the 1986 reissue of The War Against the Jews, Dawidowicz wrote that her intentionalist views were \u201cnow widely shared.\u201d8 This belief in the universal acceptance of her historiographic claims was, as we have seen, wishful thinking. Dawidowicz\u2019s perspective on the causes of the destruction of European Jewry, on the centrality of Hitler\u2019s persona and ideology to the prosecution of World War II, on antisemitism\u2019s long history in Europe and its relation to the Final Solution, and on antisemitism\u2019s elusive, yet tenacious, transmigration onto American soil was soon viewed as amateurish and parochial.<\/p>\n<p>* No discussion of the disjunction between Dawidowicz\u2019s stature in the late 1970s and today would be complete without facing the wide gulf between the scholarly and public reception of The War Against the Jews. That divide emerged again in the response to the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen\u2019s Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in 1996.42 Goldhagen focused on the Sonderweg of German antisemitism and, in so doing, reawakened the intentionalist\/functionalist debate of Dawidowicz\u2019s period.43 His argument was straightforward. Nineteenth-century antisemitism, an admixture of older Christian anti-Judaism and modern political, economic, and racial forms, prepared German society for what he called a distinctly \u201celiminationist\u201d attitude toward the Jews, which penetrated into every social class, profession, administrative body, and cultural form in twentieth-century Germany. Employing Alltagesgeschichte, Goldhagen turned this historical methodology on its head. He argued that the German people as a collective whole, not merely the Nazis and their official leadership cadres, embraced the eliminationist view of the Jews that made the Final Solution a German national project. The endemic nature of German antisemitism meant that hatred of the Jews inhered in German society even during the liberal Weimar Republic. In Goldhagen\u2019s reading, German antisemitism produced Hitler\u2014not the other way around.44 As Dawidowicz had done, Goldhagen argued that the antisemitic rhetoric and policies of the 1930s paved the way for the \u201cgenocidal solution.\u201d45<\/p>\n<p>Goldhagen\u2019s book garnered stellar reviews and went into numerous reprintings in the United States. It was also very well received by the German public.46 Yet professional historians and scholars of modern German history and the Holocaust sharply critiqued his interpretation.47 Steven Aschheim noted that the scholarly opprobrium of Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners was directly correlated to its public approbation. Scholars criticized Goldhagen\u2019s book for its monocausality, its lack of nuance, and its simplistic archetype history that posited an essential divide between good and evil, German and Jew, perpetrator and victim, banality and monstrosity, and particularism and universalism,48 charges similar to those cast against Dawidowicz.<\/p>\n<p>* Dawidowicz did, nonetheless, judge the interiority of Germans, writing that \u201cin planning and executing the Final Solution, [they] played the role of the Devil and his hosts.\u201d54 The elite leadership among the Nazis, inspired by Hitler\u2019s demonic antisemitism, had historical agency. With free will, they trespassed the universal human commandment not to murder by designing a genocide. For many years after the war, Dawidowicz grouped \u201cordinary Germans\u201d into her condemnation of Nazi brutality. Convinced that they had been indoctrinated with antisemitic views, she found them as guilty as their leaders in \u201cthe war against the Jews.\u201d Yet by 1986, she allowed that a new generation of (West) Germans could once again assert their free will, reentering human society with the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. The Sonderweg was not immutable.<\/p>\n<p>This concession, however, did not extend to those subjects of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Dawidowicz\u2019s anti-communism and her view of the totalitarian nature of Soviet society left no room for \u201cSoviet subjectivity.\u201d As we have seen from her assessment of Polish communist historiography, her book reviews, and her articles on Soviet society and culture\u2014and on the Jews who lived within the Eastern Bloc\u2014anyone who supported the Communist regimes relinquished historical agency. She had retorted to Reuben Ainsztein, \u201cIt is commonly known\u2014or so I had thought\u2014that freedom of historical inquiry was destroyed in the Soviet Union and in other Communist dictatorships.\u201d55 In Dawidowicz\u2019s view, Soviet, Polish, and East German citizens\u2014including Jews\u2014constrained by totalitarianism, could not be free historical actors. History was the handmaiden of the state and party. Taking her cue from Zelig Kalmanovitch, among other anticommunist Yiddishists whom she knew in Poland and in the United States, Dawidowicz believed that Bolshevism could not a priori allow any form of autonomous Jewish historical agency.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, although Dawidowicz absolved the men of the Judenr\u00e4te of their morally problematic actions because they had limited agency to defy the Nazis\u2019 genocidal policies, she did not absolve Jewish communists of their actions, which she saw as tantamount, if not equivalent, to the Nazis\u2019 persecution of the Jews. Jewish communists, in Dawidowicz\u2019s view, aided the destruction of Jewish culture, the source of the Jewish people\u2019s survival. Nothing they did could mitigate their support of the Soviet Union and its universalist agenda.<\/p>\n<p>* Despite her East European diaspora nationalist sensibilities and her commitment to the Jews as a transnational people, Dawidowicz absorbed and promoted the American view of religious liberty as a sine qua non of the definition of freedom. Without Judaism, no Soviet Jew or Polish Jew under communism could remain Jewish because, as she reasoned, no American Jew\u2014particularly as the ties of ethnicity loosened\u2014would be able to remain Jewish without Judaism.<\/p>\n<p>* Dawidowicz\u2019s politics also informed her view of the historical agency\u2014or lack thereof\u2014of unlikely bedfellows: African Americans and Polish gentiles. Conflating the postwar conflicts among urban African Americans and Jews as an iteration of East European tensions between rural gentile peasants and urban Jews, Dawidowicz viewed the historical agency of African Americans who demanded group rights\u2014in a manner that, in her assessment, compromised the liberal institutions that had safeguarded Jewish mobility\u2014negatively. Civil rights tactics that crossed the boundary of \u201cresponsible\u201d activism and employed violence\u2014both imagined and real\u2014triggered Dawidowicz\u2019s deep-seated fear of East European peasant violence and street hooliganism.59 She never forgave the Poles for what she believed was their willing cooperation with the Nazi regime and did not trust the historical agency of nationalist African Americans. In her October 1958 memo \u201cNegro-Jewish Tensions,\u201d written while working at the AJC, Dawidowicz concluded that Jewish and African American aspirations for separatism derived from different causes. Jews, she wrote, want \u201cto preserve their distinctiveness of culture and group, while Negroes are not typically concerned about preserving distinctiveness.\u201d Relying on Gunnar Myrdal\u2019s work, Dawidowicz concluded that African Americans avoided white society \u201cfrom a need to find shelter from bad treatment,\u201d while \u201cdeliberate Jewish separatism is likely to arise . . . from survivalist calculations.\u201d60 In short, Jewish historical agency was proactive, while that of African Americans was reactive.<\/p>\n<p>* A diaspora nationalist to the end of her days, though no longer wedded to Yiddishism as an ideology, Dawidowicz tirelessly defended the legitimacy of the Jews\u2019 claims to self-definition and self-determination wherever they lived. Just as she was aware of the political shifts in the American Jewish landscape, she also sensed the growing tension for American Jews, who, reluctant to insist on Jewish group rights, nonetheless began to feel challenged by a cultural climate increasingly inhospitable to Jewish collective distinctiveness. She may have doubted that America, which had granted European Jewish immigrants such unlimited possibility, freedom, and security, was still truly hospitable to the holistic civilization of East European Jewish peoplehood. Even as Dawidowicz moved toward an embrace of Jewish religious practice, and politically from left to right, it was East European Jewish culture, written from right to left in her \u201cbeloved\u201d Yiddish alef-beys, that formed the deepest wellspring of her Jewish identity. Yet yidishkayt, her anchor, fit uneasily into the post-ethnic, multicultural landscape of late twentieth-century America.<\/p>\n<p>*  Insisting that the hallowed \u201cAmerican Jewish liberal tradition\u201d was historically contingent, she anticipated many of today\u2019s political polarities and cultural challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &#8220;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO 4.9.10 - aioseo.com -->\n\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &quot;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"max-image-preview:large\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Luke Ford\"\/>\n\t<meta name=\"google-site-verification\" content=\"HMjuOfLRyzTPB-5Z5FG4BHkfZ1fbEij34rmbKM3BkZ4\" \/>\n\t<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"All in One SEO (AIOSEO) 4.9.10\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Luke Ford - No sacred cows.\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &quot;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:secure_url\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"800\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-04-30T01:46:14+00:00\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-04-17T23:44:15+00:00\" \/>\n\t\t<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/lukecford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@lukeford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &quot;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@lukeford\" \/>\n\t\t<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg\" \/>\n\t\t<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"aioseo-schema\">\n\t\t\t{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"BlogPosting\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#blogposting\",\"name\":\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford\",\"headline\":\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\"},\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#articleImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-04-29T17:46:14-08:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-04-17T15:44:15-08:00\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#webpage\"},\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#webpage\"},\"articleSection\":\"Jews\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#breadcrumblist\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog#listItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\",\"nextItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29#listItem\",\"name\":\"Jews\"}},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29#listItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Jews\",\"item\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29\",\"nextItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#listItem\",\"name\":\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History\"},\"previousItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog#listItem\",\"name\":\"Home\"}},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#listItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History\",\"previousItem\":{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?cat=29#listItem\",\"name\":\"Jews\"}}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#personImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"}},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#authorImage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/wp-content\\\/litespeed\\\/avatar\\\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923\",\"width\":96,\"height\":96,\"caption\":\"Luke Ford\"}},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303\",\"name\":\"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford\",\"description\":\"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * \\\"[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\\u2014or\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#website\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?p=130303#breadcrumblist\"},\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"creator\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/?author=1#author\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-04-29T17:46:14-08:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-04-17T15:44:15-08:00\"},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/\",\"name\":\"Luke Ford\",\"alternateName\":\"No Sacred Cows\",\"description\":\"No sacred cows.\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/lukeford.net\\\/blog\\\/#person\"}}]}\n\t\t<\/script>\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO -->\n\n","aioseo_head_json":{"title":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford","description":"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * \"[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or","canonical_url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303","robots":"max-image-preview:large","keywords":"","webmasterTools":{"google-site-verification":"HMjuOfLRyzTPB-5Z5FG4BHkfZ1fbEij34rmbKM3BkZ4","miscellaneous":""},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#blogposting","name":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford","headline":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person"},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#articleImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"},"datePublished":"2020-04-29T17:46:14-08:00","dateModified":"2024-04-17T15:44:15-08:00","inLanguage":"en-US","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#webpage"},"isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#webpage"},"articleSection":"Jews"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#breadcrumblist","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog#listItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog","nextItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29#listItem","name":"Jews"}},{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29#listItem","position":2,"name":"Jews","item":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29","nextItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#listItem","name":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History"},"previousItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog#listItem","name":"Home"}},{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#listItem","position":3,"name":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History","previousItem":{"@type":"ListItem","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29#listItem","name":"Jews"}}]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person","name":"Luke Ford","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#personImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"}},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1","name":"Luke Ford","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#authorImage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/af8ecf5ef66099147247f500ec429b38.jpg?ver=1784204923","width":96,"height":96,"caption":"Luke Ford"}},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#webpage","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303","name":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford","description":"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * \"[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or","inLanguage":"en-US","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#website"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303#breadcrumblist"},"author":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"creator":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?author=1#author"},"datePublished":"2020-04-29T17:46:14-08:00","dateModified":"2024-04-17T15:44:15-08:00"},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/","name":"Luke Ford","alternateName":"No Sacred Cows","description":"No sacred cows.","inLanguage":"en-US","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/#person"}}]},"og:locale":"en_US","og:site_name":"Luke Ford - No sacred cows.","og:type":"article","og:title":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford","og:description":"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &quot;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or","og:url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303","og:image":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg","og:image:secure_url":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg","og:image:width":800,"og:image:height":600,"article:published_time":"2020-04-30T01:46:14+00:00","article:modified_time":"2024-04-17T23:44:15+00:00","article:publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/lukecford","twitter:card":"summary_large_image","twitter:site":"@lukeford","twitter:title":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History - Luke Ford","twitter:description":"Here are some excerpts from this 2020 book: * &quot;[Salo] Baron was quite right in saying that until Emancipation Jews survived because of their national religion. Not that there was first a people and then a religion, but that both were forged together.\u201d53 His comment, and, indeed, Baron\u2019s perspective on Jewish modernity, betrayed a pessimism\u2014or","twitter:creator":"@lukeford","twitter:image":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/lukesanta.jpg"},"aioseo_meta_data":{"post_id":"130303","title":null,"description":null,"keywords":[],"keyphrases":{"focus":{"keyphrase":"","score":0,"analysis":{"keyphraseInTitle":{"score":0,"maxScore":9,"error":1}}},"additional":[]},"primary_term":null,"canonical_url":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"og_object_type":"default","og_image_type":"default","og_image_url":null,"og_image_width":null,"og_image_height":null,"og_image_custom_url":null,"og_image_custom_fields":null,"og_video":"","og_custom_url":null,"og_article_section":null,"og_article_tags":[],"twitter_use_og":false,"twitter_card":"default","twitter_image_type":"default","twitter_image_url":null,"twitter_image_custom_url":null,"twitter_image_custom_fields":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"schema":{"blockGraphs":[],"customGraphs":[],"default":{"data":{"Article":[],"Course":[],"Dataset":[],"FAQPage":[],"Movie":[],"Person":[],"Product":[],"ProductReview":[],"Car":[],"Recipe":[],"Service":[],"SoftwareApplication":[],"WebPage":[]},"graphName":"BlogPosting","isEnabled":true},"graphs":[]},"schema_type":"default","schema_type_options":null,"pillar_content":false,"robots_default":true,"robots_noindex":false,"robots_noarchive":false,"robots_nosnippet":false,"robots_nofollow":false,"robots_noimageindex":false,"robots_noodp":false,"robots_notranslate":false,"robots_max_snippet":"-1","robots_max_videopreview":"-1","robots_max_imagepreview":"large","priority":null,"frequency":"default","local_seo":null,"breadcrumb_settings":null,"limit_modified_date":false,"ai":null,"created":"2023-05-12 08:01:03","updated":"2025-06-05 21:56:19","seo_analyzer_scan_date":null},"aioseo_breadcrumb":"<div class=\"aioseo-breadcrumbs\"><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\" title=\"Home\">Home<\/a>\n\t\t<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb-separator\">&raquo;<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29\" title=\"Jews\">Jews<\/a>\n\t\t<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb-separator\">&raquo;<\/span><span class=\"aioseo-breadcrumb\">\n\t\t\tFrom Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History\n\t\t<\/span><\/div>","aioseo_breadcrumb_json":[{"label":"Home","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog"},{"label":"Jews","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?cat=29"},{"label":"From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=130303"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130303"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154624,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130303\/revisions\/154624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}