Rising Above Realpolitik: America, Jewish Thought and International Law
“The loftier the soul, the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.” – Rabbi Avraham Kook By any reasonable standard, the belligerent nationalism of Realpolitik or power politics makes no sense. After all, without exception, this zero-sum mantra of “everyone-for-himself” clearly undermines every country’s national security. Most perplexing, perhaps, is that [...]
I. Introduction Much of U.S. governance is held together by goodwill, unwritten norms, and the ideals that “that would never happen” and “no one would ever do that.” Every hope of continued reliance on these norms was “shattered” on January 6, 2021, when armed insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol. Under the direction of the President, [...]
The global chaos created by COVID-19 has proven to be a stress test for modern governance. The pandemic and its fallout have proven especially revealing in the context of European data policy, which is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), promulgated in May of 2018. But, COVID-19 has exposed its fault lines. While [...]
Germany court convicts 93-year-old Nazi concentration camp guard
A Hamburg juvenile court convicted a 93-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard on Thursday on 5,232 counts of accessory to murder and one count of accessory to attempted murder. Bruno Dey has been given a two-year suspended sentence, bringing to a close the trial that had begun in October. While Dey apologized to the victims and [...]
Implicit Threats of Violence: The American President's "Trump Card"
“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.” – Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I [...]
US immigration judge orders former Nazi concentration camp guard deported
US Immigration Judge Rebecca Holt issued a removal order on Thursday against Tennessee resident Friedrich Karl Berger, a former Nazi concentration camp guard. Holt found Berger removable under the Immigration and Nationality Act because his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place.” Holt ordered Berger removed [...]
93 year-old former Nazi guard stands trial for being an accessory to thousands of murders
Criminal proceedings against a 93 year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard began on Thursday. The former SS guard, referred to as Bruno D., was 17 and 18 at the time of the acts and will therefore be tried in juvenile court for assisting in 5,230 murders. Between August 1944 and April 1945, Bruno D. is [...]
I. American Border Concentration Camps and the Family Separation Policy as a Crime Against Humanity As noted by Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg Prosecutor, the intentional and unnecessary suffering under the family separation policy can easily be viewed as a crime against humanity under Article 7(1)(k) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal [...]
The trial of a former SS watchman, aged 94, began Tuesday in a Münster juvenile court. German newspaper Die Welt reports that the man, whose name is not disclosed for legal reasons, is alleged to be complicit in the murders of 65,000 victims of Stutthof Concentration Camp in Eastern Poland when he served there from [...]
The blaming of attempted bombings of prominent democratic leaders and opponents of President Trump on a vindictive press by him at a public rally casts a dark shadow over a bleak landscape where once the freedom of the press was a corner stone of our democracy. Declaring the press in the United States an “enemy [...]
