Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Cultural Property
From the Archives: Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Cultural Property NANCY SINKOFF1 In September of 1946, Lucy Schildkret, who later in life would earn renown under her married name, Lucy S. Dawidowicz,2 as an “inten- tionalist” historian of the Holocaust,3 sailed to Europe to work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC, the Joint, or the AJDC) in its overseas educational department among Jewish refugees in displaced persons (DP) camps.4 She later recalled that the journey had filled her with foreboding.5 Schildkret was returning to a Europe 1. I would like to thank David Fishman, Dana Herman, and the anonymous readers of American Jewish History for comments on earlier versions of this article. 2. I use the name Lucy Schildkret for anything she wrote prior to her marriage to Szymon Dawidowicz in January of 1948, Lucy S. Dawidowicz after her marriage, and Libe when she or her correspondents wrote in Yiddish. 3. The literature on “intentionalism” — the view that German antisemitism laid the foundation for Hitler’s early and then inexorable design to exterminate European Jewry — is enormous. See Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 80–81; Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (New York: New American Library, 1987), 37; David Engel, The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (London and New York: Longman, Pearson Education, 2000), 26–37; and Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). Despite criticism by “functionalist” historians who claimed that even with the founding of the Third Reich in 1933, no one within the Nazi Party had a coherent plan for what to do with the Jews — something that led to conflict and competition in the various Nazi agencies’ pursuit of anti-Jewish policies — Dawido- wicz maintained her “intentionalist” views throughout her life.
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