| Lucy Dawidowicz |
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| 1915 births | |
| 1990 deaths | |
| american historians | |
| jewish historians | |
| fascist---nazi era scholars and writers | |
| historians of the holocaust | |
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Davidowicz was born in New York City as Lucy Schildkret. Her parents, Max and Dora (nee Ofnaem) Schildkret were secular-minded Jews with little interest in religion. Davidowicz did not attend a service at Synagogue until 1938 . Schildkret's first interests were Poetry and Literature . She attended Hunter College from 1932 - 1936 which she obtained a BA in English. She went on to study for a MA at Columbia University , but abandoned her studies over concerns over events in Europe . At the encourgement of her mentor, the historian Jacob Shatzky , Schildkret decided to focus instead on History , especially Jewish History . Schildkret made the decision to learn Yiddish and at Shatzky's urging, in 1938 she traveled to Wilno , Poland (modern Vilnius , Lithuania ) to work at the Yiddish Scientific Institute (known by its Yiddish acronym as the YIVO ). Schildkret lived in Wilno until August 1939 when she returned to the United States . During her time at the YIVO, she became close to three of the leading scholars there, namely Zelig Kalmanovich , Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reisen . Only Weinreich survived The Holocaust and that only because he went to New York to establish a branch of the YIVO there before World War Two . In particular, Davidowicz was very close to Kalmanovich and his family, whom she described as being her real parents. During her time in Poland , she encountered some Anti-Semitism from the local Gentile population and her later writings on Gentile-Jewish relations in Poland were very much coloured by her memories of the time in Wilno. Dawidowicz was well known for her views that the vast majority of the Roman Catholic population in Poland was ferociously anti-Semitic before and during World War Two. Many historians have objected to the factual validity of this portrayal of Gentile-Jewish relations. From 1940 until 1946 , Schildkret worked as researcher at the New York office of the YIVO. During the war, she was aware that something horrible was happening to the Jewish people of Europe, through it was not until after the war she finally became aware of the full extent of the Holocaust. In 1946 , Schildkret travelled to Germany where she worked as an aid worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the various Displaced Persons (DP) camps. During this period, she involved herself in the search for various looted YIVO books in Frankfurt . Only after the war, did she realize the full extent of the Jewish catastrophe, when she became involved with providing aid for Holocaust survivors. By her own admission, she was full of sorrow over the fate of European Jews, hatred for the Germans and pride in the tenacity of Holocaust survivors. In particular, she was filled with sadness as she realized that the world of East European Jewry she had encountered and lived in Poland before the war had been destroyed forever and all that was left of it were the emaciated survivors she was working with and her own memories. Moreover, Schildkret found it very poignant that she had left that world in August 1939; a month before the progress of destruction had began. In 1947 she returned to the U.S. and on January 3 , 1948 she married a Polish Jew named Syzmon Dawidowicz. Upon her return to the U.S. she worked as a researcher for the novelist John Hersey 's book ''The Wall'', a dramatisation of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising . From 1948 until 1960 , Dawidowicz worked as a historical researcher for the American Jewish Committee . During the same period, Dawidowicz wrote frequently for the '' Commentary '', the '' New York Times '' and the ''New York Times Book Review''. An enthusiastic New York Mets fan, Dawidowicz lived the rest of her life in New York. In 1985 , she founded the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature from Yiddish and Hebrew into English . A fierce Anti-communist , Dawidowicz often campaigned for the right of Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel . Dawidowicz’s major interests were The Holocaust and Jewish History . A passionate Zionist , Dawidowicz believed that if Israel existed before 1939 , the overwhelming majority of European Jews would have been saved. In Dawidowicz’s counter-factual analysis, the Jewish state would have been a place of refuge and would have possessed sufficient military power to fight off the Third Reich . Dawidowicz took an extreme Intentionist line on the origins of the Holocaust. Dawidowicz believed that it was Adolf Hitler 's intention to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the world from the morning of November 11 , 1918 onwards. Dawidowicz argued that right from the moment that Hitler first heard of the Armistice, he conceived his master plan for the Holocaust and everything he did that from time on was directed towards the achievement of this goal. In her view, the overwhelming majority of Germans ascribed to ''völkische'' Anti-Semitism from the 1870s onwards, and it was this morbid anti-Semitism that attracted support for the Nazis. Echoing the arguments made in A.J.P. Taylor 's ''The Course of German History'', Dawidowicz believed that there was a symbiotic relationship between Hitler and the German people. Hitler needed the German people to accomplish his plans for Aggression and Genocide and the German people needed Hitler’s anti-Semitism to fill their lives with joy and realize their fondest wishes. Dawidowicz maintained that from the Middle Ages onwards, German society and culture was suffused with the most extreme anti-Semitism imaginable and there was a straight road from medieval Pogroms to the Death Camps of the 1940s . In her view, Nazi Germany was a well-organized Totalitarian machine with Hitler guiding and directing every step of his carefully thought out master plan for genocide with the German people as Hitler’s enthusiastic accomplices and followers. Citing the work of Fritz Fischer , Dawidowicz argued that there were powerful lines of continuity in German history and there was a '' Sonderweg '' (Special Path), which lead Germany inevitably to Nazism . Dawidowicz was well known for her attacks on other historians for offering what she considered to be incorrect or sympathetic views of the Nazis. Regarding foreign policy questions, she sharply disagreed with Taylor over his book ''The Origins Of The Second World War''. In even stronger terms, she condemned the American Neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan for his book ''War Forced On Germany''. In the same vein, she fiercely disapproved of David Irving and was enraged by his book ''Hitler’s War'' with its suggestion that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Dawiodowicz saw the work of every German historian relating to the Nazi Era with the notable exception of Karl Dietrich Bracher , whose scholarship she generously praised, as being in denial of German complicity for the Holocaust. In the 1980s, she accused the British historian Norman Davies of seeking to whitewash Polish Anti-Semitism and of being an Anti-Semite himself. During the same period, Dawidowicz denounced the work of the philosopher Ernst Nolte , whom she accused of seeking to justify the Holocaust. And perhaps her greatest scorn was reserved for the Functionalist school of Historiography , whom Dawidowicz charged with writing an apologia for Nazi crimes. Subjected to particular criticism were Raul Hilberg and Martin Broszat . Some of her notable books include the '' A Holocaust Reader '', a collection of primarily documents relating to the Holocaust and '' The War Against The Jews '', her best-selling 1975 history of the Holocaust. Other notable books published by Dawidowicz were '' The Holocaust And The Historians '', a study of Holocaust Historiography . Published posthumously in 1992 were a collection of her essays relating to Jewish history, '' What Is The Use Of Jewish History? '' BIBLIOGRAPHY
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