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2 - Who Will Tame the Will to Defy Humanity?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

Nathan A. Kurz
Nathan A. Kurz
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

This chapter challenges conventional wisdom about intimate connections between the Holocaust and the birth of international human rights law. Facing a human rights consensus designed around deliberate silence on the Holocaust, Jewish internationalists were unable or unwilling to make Jewish legal enslavement under Nazism a primary rationale for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international enforcement mechanisms. Speaking for the victims of the Holocaust gave Jewish internationalists little symbolic moral capital at a time most others did not want to discuss the specific fate of Jews under Nazism. The chapter also discusses early Jewish efforts at institutional-legal entrepreneurialism to develop mechanisms to bring human rights complaints to the UN.

Keywords

1948 Universal Declaration of Human RightsHolocaust memoryright of petitionMoses MoskowitzRené Cassin
Type
Chapter
Information
Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust , pp. 39 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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