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The title of the lecture is "Gender and the (Dis)Continuities of the European Jewish Enlightenment" - Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and the New York Intellectuals.
THE IMAGE OF THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS, the Jewish public intellectuals who from their 1930s-nurtured anti-Stalinism became Cold Warriors in the 1950s and neoconservatives in the 1970s, is decidedly male. Yet one woman, the German-Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is regularly invoked as a member of the group in its prewar heyday. Years later, another woman, Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990), the historian of Eastern European Jewry and of the Holocaust, became part of the group as it shifted politically toward the right and articulated a commitment to Jewish identity and survival. This lecture will juxtapose the lives of Arendt and Dawidowicz as two sides of a deep fissure that characterized the encounter of Ashkenazic Jewry with the modern world. Moreover, it will give voice to the female experience within that narrative.
NANCY SINKOFF is a professor of Jewish Studies and History, as well as the Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University. Her specialties are early modern and modern Jewish history and intellectual and Eastern European history. Nancy just published a biography of Lucy Dawidowicz, one of the first (and female) historians of the Holocaust, and an important New York intellectual. Nancy’s book is From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History.
FOR MORE INFORMATION & TO REGISTER: RSVP page.
This event is co-sponsored by University of Delaware’s Jewish Studies Program, Department of History, Department of Women and Gender Studies, Department of Philosophy, and the European Studies Program
