Book Talks: From Left to Right: The Transformation of a Pioneering Holocaust Historian

Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She is author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderland (2004) and was responsible for a new edition of Lucy Dawidowicz’s memoir, From that Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (2008). She edited the award-winning Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018), with Rebecca Cypess. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020) won the 2020 Natan Notable Book award and the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in the biography category.

David Myers holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History and is Director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He has written extensively on modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history. His books include Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (1995), Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (2003), Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (2008), Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction  (2017), and The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life  (2018). His edited volumes include The Jewish Past Revisited, Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, and The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History. He is currently working on a book (with Nomi Stolzenberg) on the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, New York. He is co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. 

David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies and Chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. He previously taught at the University of Tel Aviv, where he is a Fellow of the Diaspora Research Institute and an editor of the periodical Gal-Ed. His books include Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (1993), In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (1987), Between Liberation and Flight: Holocaust Survivors in Poland and the Struggle for Leadership, 1944–1946 (in Hebrew,1996), and Zionism (2009). His most recent books include Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (2010), The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (2013), and The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Sholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927: A Selection of Documents (2016). 

Host 

Antony Polonsky - Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University. Expertise: East European Jewish history and Holocaust studies. A founder and vice-president of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Oxford and of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, Cambridge, MA. Graduate and doctor of the University of Oxford, member of the British Royal Historical Society, honorary doctorate of the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University.