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Join the University of Delaware's Jewish Studies program along with the Department of History, the Department of Women and Gender Studies, the Department of Philosophy, and CGAS's European Studies program as they present the special event Gender and the (Dis)Continuities of the European Jewish Enlightenment: Hannah Arendt, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and the New York Intellectuals. This online event will take place on March 8 at 7pm and is free and open to the public via Zoom.
Guest speaker Nancy Sinkoff, 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, will discuss her recent book From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History.
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 1970s, is decidedly male. Yet one woman, the German-Jewish philosopher Hann 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 the Eastern European Jewry and of the Holocaust, became part of the group as it shifted politically towards the right and articulated a commitment to Jewish identity and survival.
The 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, giving voice to the female experience within that narrative.
For more information click here and to register for the free and open to the public event, click here.
