T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Summer 2017) 409–426 “A Melancholy Offering Tendered with Esteem”: Gershom Scholem and Lucy S. Dawidowicz on Nathan Birnbaum, an Unexpected Conversation NANCY SINKOFF Rutgers University I N F EBRUARY 1 9 6 3 , employed in the research division of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Lucy S. Dawidowicz (ne ´e Schildkret, 1915– 90) published a Hebrew article in its Israeli cultural journal Amot (Evalu- ations). 1 Her article, “Revolution and Tradition: The Jewish Labor Movement in America,” treated the issue that would consume her throughout her career: the relationship of Jewish tradition and values to modern Jewish politics. 2 Not yet a public figure, Dawidowicz would soon play a singular role in the postwar representation of East European Jewry for the Anglophone world with the publication of The Golden Tradi- tion: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967) and The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (1975). 3 Little known is that Dawidowicz’s engage- 1. The AJC established an Israel office in 1961 to facilitate communication between Israel and diaspora Jewry. The office’s goals included familiarizing Israelis with Western—particularly American—forms of democracy, and devel- oping “a greater understanding within Israel about American Jews and their role in American life.” Foreword, Amot 1.1 (August–September 1962): 4. See, too, In Vigilant Brotherhood: The American Jewish Committee’s Relationship to Palestine and Israel (New York, 1961), 59–60. One imagines that the AJC decided not to call the journal Midrash or Derash, a better translation of Commentary, because of those terms’ explicit religious connotations. 2. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Mahapekhah u-masoret: Tenu‘at ha-po‘alim ha- yehudit be-Amerika,” Amot 1.4 (1963): 50–57. For an English version, see “The Jewishness of the Jewish Labor Movement,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. B. W. Korn (New York, 1976), 121–30. 3. The War against the Jews was associated with what would later be known as the “intentionalist” school of Holocaust historiography. For Dawidowicz’s articu- The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2017) Copyright  2017 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.