After earning a bachelor’s in English literature at Hunter College and beginning a master’s degree in literature at Columbia University, which she never completed, she devoted herself to the study of Jewish history from in 1937 onward. In 1938, she went to Vilnius, Poland, to conduct research at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she remained until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Upon returning to the United States, Dawidowicz joined YIVO in New York, dedicating herself to researching and documenting developments during the war. In 1948, she married Szymon Dawidowicz, who had successfully escaped from Poland. Post-war, she spent 18 months in Germany working for the Joint Distribution Committee. Her role involved cataloguing books seized by the Nazis, a deeply emotional and stirring task, as the salvaged books served as reminders of their owners, many of whom had been murdered.
In 1974, Dawidowicz was appointed professor at Yeshiva University, where she held the Paul and Leah Lewis Chair in Holocaust Studies and later the Eli and Diana Zborowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies. Her best-known book, The War Against the Jews (1975), argued that the murder of European Jews had been Adolf Hitler’s objective from the beginning. This and other works earned her numerous accolades.
In her last book, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947, she described her personal experiences from her year in Vilnius to her time in the DP camps in Germany. This work offers a vivid insight into Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the horrors of the war and the relationships with survivors and perpetrators after the war. Lucy S. Dawidowicz dedicated her life to writing and teaching Jewish history and left an important legacy in historical research.
“Since the Jewish culture which had flourished in Eastern Europe had been wiped out and since it was unlikely that Hebrew and Yiddish books would ever again be published there, every surviving book from that world had become a historical document, a cultural artifact, specimen and testament of a murdered civilisation.”