[2] Her parents, Max and Dora (née Ofnaem) Schildkret, Jewish immigrants from Poland, were secular-minded with little interest in religion.

Weinreich escaped the Holocaust because he went to New York to establish a branch of the YIVO there before World War II, but Kalmanovich and Reisen perished.

Upon her return to the U.S. she worked as a researcher for the novelist John Hersey's book The Wall, a dramatization of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

[5] A passionate Zionist,[6] Dawidowicz believed that had the Mandate for Palestine been implemented as intended, establishing the Jewish State of Israel before the Holocaust, "the terrible story of six million dead might have had another outcome".

[7] Dawidowicz took an Intentionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust, contending that, beginning with the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, Hitler conceived his master plans, and everything he did from then on was directed toward the achievement of his goal,[8] and that he had "openly espoused his program of annihilation" when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1924.

Dawidowicz maintained that from the Middle Ages onward, German Christian society and culture were suffused with antisemitism and there was a direct link from medieval pogroms to the Nazi death camps of the 1940s.

[3] Citing Fritz Fischer, Dawidowicz argued that there were powerful lines of continuity in German history and there was a Sonderweg (Special Path), which inevitably led Germany to Nazism.

[10] For Dawidowicz, Nazism was the essence of total evil, and she wrote that the Nazi movement was the "... daemon let loose in society, Cain in corporate embodiment.

In her view, historians who took a functionalist line on the origins of the Holocaust question were guilty of ignoring their responsibility to historical truth.

[12] Dawidowicz was a leading critic of the American historian Arno J. Mayer's account of the Holocaust in his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?

[17] Dawidowicz questioned Mayer's motives in listing the works of Arthur Butz and Paul Rassinier in his bibliography.

"[20][21] Ronald Hilton, professor emeritus at Stanford University replied: "Davies is not anti-Semitic, his reputation for fairness is recognized internationally."

[22] During the same period, Dawidowicz denounced the work of the philosopher Ernst Nolte, whom she accused of seeking to justify the Holocaust.

Hilberg suggests that "nostalgic Jewish readers [would find here] vaguely consoling words, [which] could be easily clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper."