What Is the Use of Jewish History? - Softcover

Dawidowicz, Lucy S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805210105 ISBN 13: 9780805210101

Publisher: Schocken, 1994

Synopsis

Essays discuss the use and misuse of the Holocaust, how the Holocaust is taught in schools, Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto, a visit to Berlin, and other topics

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The eminent historian and Holocaust scholar (The War Against the Jews), who died in 1990, was the historical conscience of her people. These lively, forceful, absorbing essays and lectures from the last decade of her life, many previously published in Commentary, Shoah and elsewhere, are among her best writings. In the title essay Davidowiez argues that collective Jewish consciousness is a myth and scans history for keys to the Jews' potential for survival. In Berlin Again chronicles her return visit to the former Nazi capital and calls for Jewish reconciliation with Germans. Elsewhere, Davidowicz repudiates charges of American Jews' passivity in the face of the Holocaust, attacks the anti-Semitism of the political left and lacerates functionalist historians who blame the murder of Europe's Jews on the near-autonomous workings of an impersonal bureaucracy rather than on the will and intentions of Nazi leaders. Other pieces deal with the way public schools teach students about the Holocaust, Jewish identity in America and Soviet denial of the Nazis' massacre of Jews at Babi Yar.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This posthumous collection of previously published and unpublished essays written over the last 14 years is vintage Dawidowicz, betraying a searching quest for historical truth, penetrating analyses, and lucid, even passionate, prose. The book, with a glowing tribute to the historian by editor Kozodoy, has three thematic sections: the utility of Jewish history and the pitfalls of writing autobiography; the use and misuse of the Holocaust by secondary school curricula, scholarly works, and outrageous revisionists; and the status and potential of Jews and Judaism in America. Always worth reading, Dawidowicz was an activist historian committed to the idea that accurate knowledge of the past must be put into service for the present and future. Ironically, however, contrary to her own belief, her essays underscore the lack of certitude in historical writing, and the fact that one historian's truths are another's unsupported hypotheses. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/92.
- Benny Kraut, Univ. of Cincinnati
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Schocken
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0805210105
• ISBN 13: 9780805210101
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 278