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 “old school” 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—as 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—Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s persona and work have largely fallen by the intellectual and public wayside.
The relative status of Dawidowicz’s and Arendt’s public reception today presents a reversal of the 1960s and 1970s, when Arendt’s star dimmed and Dawidowicz’s 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
The New York intellectuals’ enthusiastic reception, and then rejection, of Arendt’s 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—or lack thereof—in total assimilation. Playing a critical role in the complicated process through which the New York intellectuals publicly worked out their relationship to Jewish culture and Jewish particularism, Arendt’s and Dawidowicz’s biographies, geographies, and cultures made them mirror images of one another. When Dawidowicz voluntarily went “backward” to Europe, she internalized the culture of Eastern Europe at the same time that Arendt, a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism, was distancing herself from it.
Historians of modern European Jewry have long recognized that at the end of the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment values affirming universalism met the birth of the modern nation-state, western Ashkenazic Jews (i.e., from German lands and the Prussian Empire) were better positioned socially, politically, economically, and culturally to enter into the modern world than were eastern Ashkenazic Jews (i.e., from Austrian and Russian Poland).5 The slower pace of modernization and the demographic strength of East European Jewry allowed traditional Jewish life to flourish in Poland, Russia, and Austrian Galicia well into the twentieth century—even as it transplanted itself to East European immigrant settlements throughout the West. The vast migration of 1.5–2 million Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to New York between 1881 and 1924 reshaped American Jewry. This largely eastern Ashkenazic diaspora re-created many aspects of East European Jewish society in New York City. They established an ethnic Jewish communal structure through hometown societies (landsmanshaftn), credit associations, schools, political parties, synagogues, newspapers, and theaters, most of which were voiced in Yiddish.6 Coming of age in the interwar years, Jewish immigrant children encountered America as ethnic outsiders. As East European Jews strove to acculturate into the norms of gentile society, they did so—as in Europe from the eighteenth century forward—in a curious process of both mirroring and distancing themselves from their more Westernized brethren.7 Many eastern Ashkenazic Jews strove to wrest themselves from their own culture, which—adjudged by Western mores—they viewed as parochial and backward.8
The journey from insular parochialism to cosmopolitan humanism was a feature of the narrative construction of the self among the New York intellectuals. Aspiring to become an intellectual and political vanguard that would make a signal mark on mid-twentieth-century American life and culture, the New York intellectuals constructed a worldview whose goals of “cosmopolitanism” assumed a certain basic alienation from their own ethnic heritage.9 Their marginality, they believed, gave them intellectual bona fides. In David Riesman’s view, “The intellect is at its best, and its ethical insights are at their best, when one is in a marginal position that is not too overpowering.”10 Alfred Kazin recalled that “The Partisan Review group . . . believed in alienation, and would forever try to outdo conventional opinion even when they agreed with it.”11 They strove to embrace the spirit of Enlightenment toleration; to reject ethnic and religious parochialism; to transcend boundaries of nationality, race, and religion; and to emphasize the complexity and diversity of the modern world. Flight from their East European Jewish immigrant milieu was necessary, as Irving Howe observed: “In the 30’s . . . it was precisely the idea of discarding the past, breaking away from families, traditions, and memories which excited intellectuals. They meant to declare themselves citizens of the world and, that succeeding, perhaps consider becoming writers of this country.”12
The first line of Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir, Making It, encapsulated the distance between their self-perceived parochialism and the cosmopolitan world: “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”13 And the leitmotif in Alfred Kazin’s memoir trilogy was, in critic Robert Alter’s view, “the story of the particular self that had crossed the distance, so small in space, so immense in the realm of values, between Brooklyn and the heights of Manhattan.”14 Brooklyn connoted the immigrant milieu with its poverty, its Yiddish, its old-world religion, its suffocating and cramped apartments, all shaping the particularistic (read: parochial) bonds of a distinct ethnic group. Manhattan meant upward mobility, America, the glories of the English language, secularism, humanism, and intellectual openness. The immigrant sons left Brooklyn, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the Bronx, metaphorically and in reality, as an act of rebellion against their parental homes and in search of the broad, cosmopolitan world of non-Jewish ideas and letters. A similar symbolic and geographic journey had been made by East European Jews in the late eighteenth century to seek enlightenment in cosmopolitan Berlin.15 There they sought to acquire Bildung, the enlightened educational ethos of moral, aesthetic, and humanistic self-cultivation and self-transformation that promised a society in which ethnic and religious differences were utterly irrelevant.16
Before the war, the New York intellectuals viewed their Jewishness as an obstacle to full participation in American culture and helped to create a neutral society in which their ethnic backgrounds would blend without a trace into American culture. Many were students of the Left, and until Pearl Harbor held pacifist and isolationist views.17 The fate of European Jewry did not weigh heavily on their minds. Saul Bellow remarked to Cynthia Ozick in the 1980s, “ ‘Jewish writers in America’ (a repulsive category!) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry.”18 Reflecting on those years, Milton Himmelfarb recalled, “We were far less concerned than our elders and the Jewish Establishment about Jewish woes.”
Many agreed that fascism was only capitalism in extremis. Our own ambitions and opportunities were blocked or diverted by antisemitic discriminations, but we took it for granted that to concern ourselves directly with antisemitism, as our parents and the official Jews did, was to worry about a mere symptom.19
Even in the immediate aftermath of the war, the news of the destruction of the Jews of Europe hardly factored into the New York intellectuals’ trajectory of acculturation.20 Universalist values continued to shape their hearts and minds in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, Jewish Frontier, a labor Zionist journal, published an exchange between Daniel Bell and Ben Halpern, the magazine’s managing editor, regarding the role of Jewish intellectuals in postwar America. Bell saw no purpose in an ethnic-religious worldview. Jewishness, to have meaning, had to be linked to a secular universalist, this-worldly Weltanschauung. Halpern, the Zionist activist, challenged Bell’s alienation from Jewish communal life, asserting the value in Jewish national fellowship.21
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’s 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’s Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. But Arendt’s 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 “The Family.”24 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.
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’s protean German-Jewish identity, has remarked that the ferocity of attachments and attacks on Arendt illustrates the “profound intellectual magnetism she must have exuded.”25 Steven Aschheim has explained that her appeal reflected “her 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”—and in so doing, to provide “a kind of dignity and importance to a previously marginalized, even derided, existence.”26
As a German-Jewish cosmopolitan intellectual, Arendt commanded intellectual and cultural “capital” 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 “feminine” or “sexual” capital.27 In New York Jew, Alfred Kazin wrote evocatively of his friendship with Hannah and her husband, Heinrich Blücher, recalling his first meeting with them at a Commentary dinner in the fall of 1947, where he had been “enthralled [by Hannah], by no means unerotically.”28 Richard Cook, Kazin’s biographer, remarked that “Kazin was crazy about her, even in an erotic sense,” and that he described how “he blushed with pleasure holding her arm on the subway.”29 Kazin told his young fiancée, 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 “made believe that I did not exist even when we were a few feet apart, staring into each other’s faces.”31 Irving Howe, looking back in his autobiography, recalled that “While far from ‘good-looking’ in any commonplace way, Hannah Arendt was a remarkably attractive person, with her razored gestures, imperial eye, dangling cigarette.” He noted, too, that Arendt “made an especially strong impression on intellectuals—those who, as mere Americans, were dazzled by the immensities of German philosophy.”
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.32
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’s sexual confidence could be felt by men and women in her circle.34
Then came Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book’s 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’s accusation that the Jewish communal leadership had aided the Nazis—when 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—seemed to give the lie to Arendt’s 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.
Arendt and Dawidowicz represented the two streams of the same historical-cultural process by which Ashkenazic Jewry—western and eastern, respectively—had 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’s perspective on the destruction of European Jewry as part of a “Western Jewish narrative,” which took the individual and her break with community and tradition as a starting point.36 The “Eastern Jewish narrative,” 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 mentalité. Polish Jewry was secure in itself and experienced “elemental continuities that persist[ed] from the early modern period almost to the present.”37
Enter Lucy S. Dawidowicz as the personification of this “Eastern Jewish narrative.” 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, Łódź, 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’s The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, published twelve years after Arendt’s 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.
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
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’ group.40 Only the comeliest women gained entry into the group—Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Diana Trilling, and, much later, Susan Sontag—and then only one woman at a time. As Norman Podhoretz commented in Making It, there could be only one “Dark Lady” of American letters, and she had to be “clean, learned, good-looking, capable of writing family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness.”41 Dawidowicz lacked the academic pedigree, the universalist bona fides, and the requisite “feminine capital” 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.
That said, Dawidowicz eventually became an éminence grise for many of the New York intellectuals, but only later, when they “discovered” their Jewish roots. By the late 1970s, partly in reaction to their frustrating encounter with the New Left and the growing power of Holocaust consciousness in the American public, a clear shift in their worldview as liberal Americans and cosmopolitan Jews can be seen. “We were living directly after the Holocaust of the European Jews,” Irving Howe wrote.
We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap.44 At least some of us could not help feeling that in our earlier claims to have shaken off all ethnic distinctiveness there had been something false, something shaming. Our Jewishness might have no clear religious or national content, it might be helpless before the criticism of believers; but Jews we were, like it or not, and liked or not.45
This primal recognition, part of the “ethnic turn” many of the New York intellectuals made in the late 1970s, allowed them to embrace Dawidowicz’s particularistic perspective on Nazism’s campaign against the Jews. Her entry into the circle of New York intellectuals served to certify her perspective on Jewish history and politics. It also meant that they, in turn, gave her views more prominence than they might have as an unknown female historian working at a Jewish college.
After the publication of The War Against the Jews, Dawidowicz went on to publish two other book-length studies related to the Holocaust (A Holocaust Reader, 1976; The Holocaust and the Historians, 1981) and articles on the topic in an array of scholarly and popular journals. True to her core beliefs about the Jewish past, she remained hopeful about diasporic Jewish life despite the heinous crimes perpetrated against the East European Jewish community. Dubnow’s insistence that the Jews had always created dynamic centers of Jewish life outside the land of Israel continued to inform her conception of Jewish history. The American diaspora, already an important center in Jewish life, awaited its narrators and interpreters. Dawidowicz hoped to make a major contribution to this effort, but it never came to fruition. Her archives house a vast repository of her notes for a history of the Jews of America that she never completed.
She did, however, continue to write about American Jewish communal life and politics and held up the banner of Dubnow’s optimism regarding the liberal rule of law. In the 1970s and 1980s, she argued that the leadership of the Jews in the American diaspora was best advised to follow the political lead established by the law of the gentile hosts among whom they lived. This posture informed her writings on the Jewish Left, particularly on the renewed attraction to communism and radicalism in the 1970s, as well as her defense of the United States and FDR against accusations of having abandoned Europe’s Jews during the war. Dawidowicz maintained her strong ties to Commentary magazine as it moved rightward politically, a turn that paralleled her own.