Ferencz, Benjamin B., (Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, [hc, Harvard UP, 1979]) 978-0674525252 [pb, Indiana UP, 2002] 978-0253215307 [As a United States war crimes investigator during World War II, Benamin B. Ferencz participated in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. He returned to Germany after the war to help bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice and remained to direct restitution programs for Nazi victims. In Less Than Slaves, Ferencz describes the painstaking efforts that were made to persuade German industrial firms such as I. G. Farben, Krupp, AEG, Rheinmetall, and Daimler-Benz to compensate camp inmates who were exploited as forced laborers. The meager outcome of these efforts emerges from searing pages that detail the difficulties confronted by Ferencz and his dedicated colleagues. This engrossing narrative is a vital resource for all who are concerned with the moral, legal, and practical implications of the recent significant increase in the number of compensation claims by victims of persecution. First published in 1979, Ferencz's penetrating firsthand account returns to print with the author's evaluation of its historical significance and current relevance. – Amazon]
Section 4.5
U.S. Jewish Prosecutors
Broyde, Michael J., "Practicing Criminal Law: A Jewish Law Analysis of Being a Prosecutor or Defense Attorney," Fordham Law Review, 66(4), pp. 1141–1182 (1998). [This comprehensive academic paper examines the distinct ethical challenges Jewish prosecutors face through the lens of the Talmud and Jewish legal tradition.]
Schachter, Hershel, "Dina DeMalchusa Dina: Secular Law As a Religious Obligation." Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, 1(1), pp. 103–132 (1981). [This article explores the theological foundations under which American Jewish attorneys and prosecutors operate within a secular criminal justice system.]
Taylor, Telford, (Courts of Terror: Soviet Criminal Justice and Jewish Emigration [hc, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976]) 978-0394405094 [pb, Knopf, 1976] 978-0394717586 [The Amazon description following is limited to the book’s 1976 perspective, but well dramatizes the struggle of Taylor and his Jewish legal colleagues on behalf of Soviet Jewry:
Working in secret for the past several years, a group of distinguished American attorneys has mounted an intensive campaign to secure the release of a score of Russians, most of them Jews attempting to emigrate to Israel, who have been incarcerated in Soviet prisons on a variety of trumped-up charges.
Telford Taylor, prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials and now professor of law at Columbia University, is one of them. In this book he makes public how he and his colleagues—among them Alan Dershowitz, Leon Lipson, George Fletcher, and Melvin Stein—have challenged the Soviet judicial system on its own legal grounds, and how the Soviet Union has subverted its own rules for the conduct of trials and the confinement of prisoners in order to accommodate a government policy of discouraging emigration without appearing to prohibit it.
The author tells how he and his fellow attorneys prepared and presented to Russian officials petitions containing documentation of false indictments and twisted trial procedures. In one case, a factory mechanic, Isaac Shkolnik, accused of spying for the British, was brought to trial—when the British government denied the accusation—on charges of spying for Israel. In another, a carpenter, Pinkhas Pinkhasov, was tried and imprisoned for overpricing his services after his emigration permit had been issued. Taylor discloses how in case after case, trial after trial, charges have been fabricated, defendants have been denied counsel of their choice, and witnesses requested by the defense have been barred from testifying—all in clear defiance of Soviet law.
And—perhaps the most appalling of his revelations—he brings to light the shocking abuse of Jewish prisoners in the camps at the hands of ling-time inmates who were sentenced at the end of World War II for Nazi activities and who by virtue of seniority have become trusties with power to discipline the newcomers.
As of early 1976, despite the arduous labors of the American attorneys, despite their visits to Moscow to make personal appeals to Soviet officials (highlighted in Taylor’s account of his dramatic meeting with Roman Rudenko, now the Kremlin’s Procurator General, who served with him as a prosecutor at Nuremberg thirty years ago), only two of the prisoners had achieved early release in possibly unrelated actions. Courts of Terror documents with stinging force how a judicial system can be—and has been—perverted to serve the political purposes of totalitarian state. It is published to set forth the facts, and in hope of opening up new ways to action on behalf of the men who are still unjustly held prisoner. – Amazon]
Mermelstein, Ari, Victoria Saker Woeste, Ethan Zadoff, and Marc Galanter, eds., (Jews and the Law [hc, Quid Pro, LLC, 2014]) 978-1610272292 [pb, Quid Pro, LLC, 2014] 978-1610272278 [A scholarly collection examining the historical relationship between Jews, Jewish identity, and the legal profession, especially in the United States, while also treating Germany and Israel. Originating in a 2006 conference at Cardozo Law School, the essays ask how Jews entered and reshaped secular legal institutions while negotiating the sometimes competing claims of Jewish tradition, professional identity, assimilation, and public service.
The volume traces the rise of Jewish lawyers from an often-excluded minority to a major presence in American law. Topics include antisemitism and professional exclusion; Jewish law firms; Louis Marshall, Julius Henry Cohen, and Benjamin Cardozo; Jewish lawyers associated with both liberal and conservative causes; Jewish participation in Legal Realism; and Jewish attitudes toward law and “legalism.” Eli Wald's substantial chapter, “The Jewish Law Firm: Past and Present,” pp. 65–123, is especially useful for the sociology and history of Jewish participation in American legal practice.
The collection's broader argument is that Jewish lawyers should not simply be understood through an assimilation narrative—Jews gaining admission to a previously WASP-dominated profession. Jewish lawyers also helped change American legal culture and institutions, bringing differing commitments to social justice, public-interest advocacy, Jewish communal concerns, and legal reform. Other essays broaden the discussion to Jewish legal experience in Germany and Israel and to the intellectual relationship between Jewish law and secular jurisprudence. – ChatGPT]
Mitchell, Dalia Tsuk, (Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism [hc, Cornell UP, 2007]) 978-0801439568 [A major figure in American legal history during the first half of the twentieth century, Felix Solomon Cohen (1907–1953) is best known for his realist view of the law and his efforts to grant Native Americans more control over their own cultural, political, and economic affairs. A second-generation Jewish American, Cohen was born in Manhattan, where he attended the College of the City of New York before receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University and a law degree from Columbia University. Between 1933 and 1948 he served in the Solicitor's Office of the Department of the Interior, where he made lasting contributions to federal Indian law, drafting the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, and, as head of the Indian Law Survey, authoring The Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1941), which promoted the protection of tribal rights and continues to serve as the basis for developments in federal Indian law.
In Architect of Justice, Dalia Tsuk Mitchell provides the first intellectual biography of Cohen, whose career and legal philosophy she depicts as being inextricably bound to debates about the place of political, social, and cultural groups within American democracy. Cohen was, she finds, deeply influenced by his own experiences as a Jewish American and discussions within the Jewish community about assimilation and cultural pluralism as well the persecution of European Jews before and during World War II.
Dalia Tsuk Mitchell uses Cohen's scholarship and legal work to construct a history of legal pluralism―a tradition in American legal and political thought that has immense relevance to contemporary debates. She traces the many ways in which legal pluralism informed New Deal policymaking and demonstrates the importance of Cohen's work on behalf of Native Americans in this context, thus bringing federal Indian law from the margins of American legal history to its center. By following the development of legal pluralism in Cohen's writings, Architect of Justice demonstrates a largely unrecognized continuity in American legal thought between the Progressive Era and ongoing debates about multiculturalism and minority rights today. A landmark work in American legal history, this biography also makes clear the major contribution Felix S. Cohen made to America's legal and political landscape through his scholarship and his service to the American government. – Amazon]
Turkus, Burton B., and Sid Feder, (Murder, Inc.: The Story of “The Syndicate.” [hc, Tenacity Media Group, 2015] 978-0996285537 [pb, Tenacity Media, 2012] 978-0615643021 [See related film] [- originally published by Farrar, Straus & Young in 1951. Murder Inc. by former Brooklyn D.A. Burton B. Turkus and veteran A.P. war correspondent Sid Feder is the riveting true crime classic that rips the lid off the national crime Syndicate's "killing machine" that took 1,000 lives nationwide during the 1930's and 40's. In a page-turning non-fiction account that reads like a crime thriller, Turkus and Feder take us behind the scenes with the untold story of how Sicilian gangsters Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis partnered with Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter to create a multi-million rackets enterprise that included, gambling, prostitution, union corruption and the lucrative murder-for-hire scheme that operated out of the back of a Brooklyn Candy Store. After he was able to turn, Murder Inc.'s chief killer, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, Turkus eventually sent Lepke and six other mobsters to the electric chair. This 1951 best seller by Turkus & Feder which has sold more than a million copies worldwide is now available in a new updated edition complete with mug shots and bios of the original gangsters who spilled so much blood from coast to coast. – Amazon]
Meier, Andrew, (Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty [hc, Random House, 2022]) 978-1400068852 [pb, Random House, Trade Paperbacks, 2023] 978-0812981049 [ - a sweeping history of four generations of the prominent German-Jewish American Morgenthau family, using the family to trace more than a century of American political, legal, and Jewish history.
The book begins with Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856–1946), a successful New York real-estate investor who became U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire under Woodrow Wilson. He is especially remembered for documenting and protesting the Armenian genocide. His son, Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891–1967), became Franklin D. Roosevelt's longtime Secretary of the Treasury and one of the most influential Jews in the New Deal administration. During World War II he pressed the Roosevelt administration to do more to rescue European Jews and was instrumental in establishing the War Refugee Board in 1944.
For a study of Jews and law enforcement, however, the most relevant figure is the next generation: Robert M. Morgenthau (1919–2019). After serving as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he became Manhattan District Attorney, holding that office from 1975 to 2009. He developed a formidable reputation for prosecuting organized crime, corruption, financial fraud, tax evasion, and homicide. Meier portrays him as an exceptionally powerful prosecutor whose conception of public service was deeply connected to the Morgenthau family's tradition of civic responsibility.
Meier also follows the family's complicated relationship with Jewish identity. The Morgenthaus belonged to an assimilated, wealthy German-Jewish elite and were far removed from the Eastern European immigrant Jewish experience that came to dominate New York Jewish life. Yet Jewish identity repeatedly became important at moments of crisis—particularly the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Israel, antisemitism, and questions of Jewish public responsibility.
The book is therefore considerably more than a biography of Robert Morgenthau. It is a family saga about wealth, assimilation, political power, public service, and Jewish identity, showing how successive Morgenthaus moved from private wealth into diplomacy, national government, and criminal justice. The sections on Robert Morgenthau's career as federal prosecutor and Manhattan DA make it an especially valuable source on the history of Jews in American prosecution and law enforcement. – ChatGPT]
Specter, Arlen, with Charles Robbins, (Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton [hc, HarperCollins, 2000]) 978-0060198497 [pb, HarperPerennial, 2001] 978-0060958107 [Before his 30-year career as Senator for Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter (1930-2012) was Philadelphia district attorney (1966–74), so he provides a substantial example of Jewish involvement in prosecution and law enforcement. He possessed a strong Jewish identity but expressed it primarily in ethnic, historical, ethical and political rather than Orthodox religious terms. Growing up in the only Jewish family in a small Kansas town, memories of his immigrant parents and Russian pogroms, encounters with professional antisemitism, and concern for Israel and Soviet Jewry all contributed to that identity. Passion for Truth is principally a legal-political memoir rather than a Jewish memoir, but its account of Specter's background helps explain the Jewish consciousness underlying the career of one of the most important Jewish prosecutors and U.S. senators of his generation. – ChatGPT]