Lucy D. Dawidowicz, in The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, tells the story of the evolution of the Nazi campaign led by Adolf Hitler to destroy the Jews in Europe. Dawidowicz was inspired by Rabbi David Mirsky, Dean of Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, who encouraged the author to expand to book form the subjects covered in a course she taught at the University. Her education was acquired at Hunter College, Columbia University in New York, and the Yivo Institute of Jewish Research in Poland where she became intimately acquainted with East European Jewish life and culture. She has also taught at Stanford University and the State University of New York at Albany. She has written three earlier book related to the Holocaust and Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.
Based on the author's introduction, the reader can expect to learn about the nature and development of Hitler's efforts to eliminate the Jewish population from Germany and Europe, the responses of the Jews themselves, and effects on the Jews of the Holocaust. The author succeeds in accomplishing these goals.
Dawidowicz first shows how Hitler's anti-Jewish ideology developed. From the beginning of his career,
the idea to murder the Jews was just an inchoate phantom inhabiting Hitler's mind. But after he came to power and began to carry out the blueprint for Germany that he had drafted in Mein Kampf, that idea began to develop in stages, synchronized with his other notions for the restoration of racial purity in the German people (Dawidowicz xxi).
The author does effectively show the evolution of Hitler's and the Nazis' anti-Jewish thought and subsequent action, leading from assaults on their rights, to assaults on their livelihood, and finally to efforts to end their existence as a people. She seeks to find out and show how it was possible for a government to kill six million Jews in a systematic campaign of murder.
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