How to Say Genocide in Hebrew? Forgotten Voices from Eichmann Trial

Please join us for a conversation about Professor Leora Bilsky on her new book How to Say Genocide in Hebrew? Forgotten Voices from Eichmann Trial. Professor Bilsky (Tel Aviv University) will present her book in discussion with Professor Justin Cammy (Smith College) and Professor Lawrence Douglas (Amherst College).

The book centers on the struggle over the meaning of genocide in the Eichmann trial, returning to marginalized voices who sought to extend the concept of genocide to include cultural annihilation. It focuses on the testimonies of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, the historian Salo Baron, and the writer and activist Rachel Auerbach who understood the crime of genocide as a systematic attack on a group of people and its cultural identity, a crime directed against difference itself. Their testimonies sought to expose the systematic attach on the group’s cultural resources (its language, books and archives), and to tell the story of ‘cultural resistance ’as a counterresponse to the crime. They saw in the Eichmann trial an opportunity to revolutionize the law to go beyond the narrow understanding of the 1948 Genocide Convention in order to create effective protection against cultural genocide. Their vision can open up new directions for international criminal law at a time when the question of cultural genocide returns to haunt humanity at large.

Leora Bilsky is the Benno Gitter Chair in Human Rights and Holocaust Research at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law as well as the director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights, also at Tel Aviv University. Her areas of research include law and the Holocaust, transitional justice and the era of the witness, political trials, criminal international law, and feminist legal theory.