• Sinkoff, Nancy
  • Nancy Sinkoff
  • Professor of Jewish Studies and History; Academic Director, Bildner Center
  • Schools: PhD Columbia University; MA Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; BA, Harvard-Radcliffe College
  • CV File: Sinkoff_CV_09.2021.pdf
  • Office Address: 12 College Avenue, Bildner Center
  • Phone Number: 848-932-8681

Research Interests

Jewish History, particulary Early Modern Poland and Modern Europe
Jewish Politics
Jewish Labor and the Jewish Left
European Enlightenment

Regularly Taught Courses

American Jewish History
Between Nazism and Communism
The History of East European Jewry 
Jewish Historical Fiction
Jewish Politics, Jewish Power
Modern Jewish History
Modern Jewish Historiography
A Tale of Two Uprisings

Books

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, (Wayne State University Press, 2020, pb. 2023).
Winner of the Natan Notable Book award for fall 2020 and the National Jewish Book Award for 2020 in the biography category.

Cypess, Rebecca and Sinkoff, Nancy, eds. Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin. (University of Rochester Press, June 2018).
2019 Book Prize winner, the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society

"Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz," Introduction to Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (Rutgers University Press, xiii-xxxix. 2008).

Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, (Brown Judaic Studies 2004; 2nd edition, digitized and with a new preface, 2020), FREE access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5tn.

left right 102869Sara Levys WorldFrom That Place and TimeOut of the Shtetl

Articles and Book Chapters:

Preface,” Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, 6 pages.

Menachem Mendel Lefin of Satanów (also Mendel Lefin Satanower), “Prayer against the Hasidim,” trans. Nancy Sinkoff, from Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (Providence, R.I.: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), pp. 274–75, in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6: Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880, eds. Elisheva Carlebach and Deborah Dash Moore (Yale University Press, 2019): 242-43. 

“Dubnow’s Other Daughter: Jewish Eastern Europe in Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s The Golden Tradition,” in Making History Jewish: The Dialectics of Jewish History in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Studies in Honor of Professor Israel Bartal, eds. Paweł Maciejko and Scott Ury (Brill, 2020): 229-252.

Introduction: Experiencing Sara Levy’s World.” Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, co-edited with Rebecca Cypess (Eastman Studies in Music Series, University of Rochester Press, 2018): 1-18.

A Melancholy Offering, Tendered with Esteem, Gershom Scholem and Lucy S. Dawidowicz on Nathan Birnbaum, an Unexpected Conversation,”The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Summer 2017) 409–426.

From the Archives: Lucy S. Dawidowicz and the Restitution of Jewish Cultural Property,” American Jewish History 100:1 (January 2016): 117-147.

"Sisters and Strangers: Hannah Arendt and Lucy S. Dawidowicz," Heritage (Winter 2014): 22-23.

"Fiction's Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography and Philosemitism in John Hersey's The Wall", Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, new series 17, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 48–79.

The Polishness of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s Postwar Jewish Cold War.” A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America, eds. Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (Rutgers University Press, 2010): 31-47.

"Between History and Law: The Case of Joseph Perl in Austrian Galicia," (Hebrew), The Varieties of Haskalah, Shmuel Feiner and Israel Bartal, editors (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 2005): 123-136.

"The Maskil, the Convert, and the Agunah: Joseph Perl as a Historian of Jewish Divorce Law," AJS Review 27:2 (2003), 281-300.

"Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanów (1749-1826)," New Perspectives on the Haskalah, David Sorkin and Shmuel Feiner, editors (London and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001): 86-102.

"Benjamin Franklin in Jewish Eastern Europe: Cultural Appropriation in the Age of the Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (January 2000): 133-152.

Educating for "Proper" Jewish Womanhood: A Case Study in Domesticity and Vocational Training, 1897-1926, American Jewish History, 77:4 (June 1988) p.572.

Reviews and Review Essays:

Travels in Translation: Sea Tales at the Source of Jewish Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016), by Ken Frieden. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 31, Textual Transmission of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, ed. Uzi Rebhun (guest symposium editor: Avriel Bar-Levav) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020): 266-269.

A Difficult Woman: the Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), by Alice Kessler-Harris. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, volume 28, ed. Anat Helman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015): 280-283.

The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), by Yehuda Bauer. Slavic Review 70:2 (Summer 2011): 441-42.

Review essay of Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right and Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons. American Jewish History, 96:1 (March 2010): 83-88.

The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), by Murray Friedman. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 24, The Protestant-Jewish Conundrum, eds. Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 233-235.

"(What Was Once) The World's Largest Jewish CommunityJewish Quarterly Review, 97:4 (Fall 2007): 647–659.

My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007), by Edward Fram. Canadian Slavonic Papers 51:4 (December 2009): 522-23.

Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), by Glenn Dynner. Slavic Review 66:4 (Winter 2007): 733-34.

Jewish Life in Cracow, 1918-1939 (Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2004), by Sean Martin. Slavic Review 65:2 (Summer 2006): 362-63.

"Fireweed: A Political Autobiography,” by Gerda Lerner. Forward, October 18, 2002.

"Triestine Jewry: The Exception that Proves the Habsburg State-Building Rule." Review of Lois Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, CA, 1999), This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (H-NET List for the study of East Central European History since 1500). May 24, 2000.

Blogposts:

"The Untold Story of the ‘New York Intellectuals’,"  The New York Jewish Week, April 5, 2021.

How Do We Honor an Anti-Feminist on International Women’s Day?”. American Jewish Historical Society, March 2, 2020.

The World of Sara Levy.” Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. April 2019.

The Creation of Sara Levy’s World,” with Rebecca Cypess. Proofed: A Boydell and Brewer Blog. July 4, 2018.

Sara Levy’s World.” Musicology Now, May 2015.

What’s a Friend to Do? Blogpost review of “Hannah Arendt.” Lilith Magazine, February 2013.

Podcasts:

On TLV1!  Listen to The Best and Worst of Both Worlds

https://tlv1.fm/the-tel-aviv-review/2020/05/25/the-best-and-worst-of-both-worlds/ May 25, 2020

Bnai Brith International Podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc7eULbF424 May 11, 2020

The Marc Bernier Show, BookMarc:

https://www.marcberniershow.com/Nancy-Sinkoff-8-6889.html May 4, 2020

The Bookmonger in National Review:

https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-bookmonger/episode-292-from-left-to-right-by-nancy-sinkoff/ March 30, 2020.

New Books Network, New Books in History: 

https://newbooksnetwork.com/nancy-sinkoff-from-left-to-right-lucy-s-dawidowicz-the-new-york-intellectuals-and-the-politics-of-jewish-history-wayne-state-up-2020/ March 17, 2020

Professional Affiliations

American Historical Association
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
Association for Jewish Studies
Women's Caucus, Association for Jewish Studies
Columbia Faculty Seminar, Center for Israel and Jewish Studies