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"War Against the Jews"
by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

I would like to recommend, the book, The War Against the Jews by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who is a scholar of Jewish life. The book is regarded as an in-depth, pioneering study of Nazi genocide.


About the Mrs. Dawidowicz and War Against the Jews

She was the daughter of Polish immigrants, was at the center of the study of the modern Jewish experience at Yeshiva University, where she held a chair in interdisciplinary Holocaust studies. Early in her career, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, she went to Europe, where she helped Jewish survivors of the war to re-create schools and libraries, and she recovered vast collections of books seized by the Nazis.

Before that, while in her early 20's, she had lived in Vilna, Poland, from 1938 to 1939, where she witnessed the onslaught of European anti-Semitism, writing about the experience in a memoir, "From That Place and Time," published by W. W. Norton last year. Her other books include "The Jewish Presence" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) in 1977 and "The Holocaust and the Historians" (Harvard University Press), a critical survey of scholarship on the Holocaust, in 1981. Hopes Turn to Agonies

"There was a certain irony to my trip to Vilna," Mrs. Dawidowicz told an interviewer for Publisher's Weekly, speaking of her pre-war experience in Poland. "I went there with the romantic belief that it might become the world center for a self-sustaining Yiddish culture."

When she saw what turned out to be the beginning of the end of Jewish life in Poland, she immersed herself in Yiddish literature and Jewish history, so that she could help to preserve Jewish culture in the postwar world.

Mrs. Dawidowicz (pronounced dah-vee-DOH-vich), a small energetic woman who spoke in the accents of the Bronx, engaged in heated arguments within Jewish circles over both the nature of the Holocaust and the responsibility of American Jews for not doing more to prevent it.

Her major work, "The War Against the Jews," postulates that the destruction of the Jews was a central and inescapable element in Nazi ideology and was always a principle war aim of Hitler, just as important as his military conquest of Europe. In this view, she conflicted with other historians, who believed that the Holocaust was not a necessary part of the Nazi program but evolved in response to such circumstances as the defeats on the Eastern front.

"The War Against the Jews" (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) was called "a work of high scholarship and profound moral import" by Irving Howe, in his review in The New York Times Book Review. It is marked above all by its sobriety. Mrs. Dawidowicz allows the coolly accumulated weight of detail -- the growing force of the Nazi's anti-Semitic juggernaut, the evolution of the camps as places of scientific murder, the efforts by the victims to hold onto fragments of normal life -- to create its emotional and intellectual impact.

Mrs. Dawidowicz refused to judge the failure of the Jews themselves to mount a more active resistance to the genocide, and in this she clashed bitterly with a number of other historians.

Her belief was twofold. First, she felt it morally inappropriate for those who did not face the persecutions themselves to criticize the behavior of those who did. Second, she felt that in any case, Jewish resistance was doomed to failure. Given the Jews' isolation, their lack of arms and the overwhelming material superiority of their enemies, there was virtually nothing they could have done to alter their fate, she wrote. Defended Role of Jews

In her book The Holocaust and the Historians, Mrs. Davidowicz is critical of a number of historians and commentators -- Bruno Bettelheim, Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg are among those she mentions -- who described the European Jews during the war as passive, cowardly or, in the case of the Judenrat, set up by the Nazis as self-governing boards in the ghettos, even collaborationist.

Similarly, Mrs. Dawidowicz rejected a chorus of opinion to the effect that Jews in the United States were guilty of complacency and a failure to react effectively to the Holocaust.

In articles in Commentary magazine and The New York Times, she wrote, first, that the Jews here did undertake wipespread efforts to awaken the government and world opinion to the fate of the European Jews. Second, she argued that, in any case, whatever might have been done here, the Jews of Europe were caught in a vise from which virtually no escape was ever possible. The only way to save them, she believed, was to militarily defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible, and that fact justified the Allies' concentration on the war effort, rather than on efforts to save the Jews.

Mrs. Dawidowicz, whose maiden name was Lucy Schildkret, was born in New York in 1915 and educated at Hunter College and Columbia University. She recounts in "From That Time and Place" how she began to work for YIVO's Manhattan branch after her year in Vilna. She met her husband, Szymon Dawidowicz, an escapee from Poland there. Mr. Dawidowicz died in 1979.

Source material:
The New York Times