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This chapter focuses on the State of Israel and the World Jewish Congress, two different political bodies founded by the Jewish people to achieve equality. The role of the State of Israel is to defend against the danger that the World Jewish Congress might come to resemble other exclusively transnational entities, while the role of the World Jewish Congress is to guard the Jewish State from becoming too much like other nations. This chapter explains how this dual set of national and transnational rights and responsibilities was achieved.

This chapter focuses on the Cold War, which split both Europe and its Jews into two camps. The Cold War imposed new barriers, both literally and figuratively. For the Jews of western Europe in particular, Soviet and American threats of unleashing nuclear missiles raised the prospect of a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler over his ideological and ‘racial’ enemies. Divisions also arose in the communities themselves, reviving political debates from the interwar period that threatened to undo the fragile unity that leaders had attempted to forge after 1945. Yet rising East–West tensions did not totally paralyse west European Jewish communal life. Despite the formidable obstacles, both non-communist left-wing elements in the European Section of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and mainstream leaders in western Europe worked diligently to steer a middle path between the demands of local political militants and leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States.

Legal groups devoted to building international criminal law between 1919 and 1939 were rarely concerned with the rights of minorities or what are today called “human rights.” During World War Two, an organization that had been involved in minority rights, but not criminal prosecution—the World Jewish Congress—began developing new legal theories to prosecute Nazis who had planned and ordered crimes against Jews inside and outside of Germany. This was a challenging legal problem because many of these crimes were not covered under the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The World Jewish Congress successfully lobbied Allied government to include crimes against the Jews at the first Nuremberg trial and contributed a major legal brief that heavily influenced the U.S. prosecution. However, the Congress’ ultimate impact on the legal judgment was limited. Its main contribution was to advance a new concept of a “victim-centered” justice that included trials, restitution, and reparations

This chapter discusses the contribution of the Germany Jewry to the outer development of modern Judaism. The German Jews not only helped bring about the founding of the Jewish state and the World Jewish Congress, they also helped in shaping Judaism's inner renewal. The accomplishments of German Jewry constitute a rich and exemplary legacy bestowed upon the world's Jewish communities displaying the confident certainty of a Jewish cultural renaissance matching the greatest cultural achievements of Jewish antiquity and the Jewish Middle Ages.