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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

Chapter 3—the second to explore the theme Voice—considers Shabtai Rosenne’s response to Hersch Lauterpacht’s reproach of Israel’s aversion to the individual right of petition. Rosenne castigated Lauterpacht for expressing an ‘extreme non-Zionist, apolitical concept of Jewish public life and the Jewish place on the international scene’ challenging, thereby, Lauterpacht’s representative capacity and ideological credentials. The right of petition and human rights writ large were, for Rosenne, assimilationist projects. Both were premised on individual, not collective, Jewish subjecthood; both were antithetical to how Zionism constructed the legal-political status of Jews and saw the Diaspora as the root cause of the modern Jewish predicament. Moreover, by investing individual Jews with the capacity to appear before international bodies, the right of petition challenged Israel’s sovereign claim to paramount Jewish voice in the world arena; Lauterpacht’s reproach thus challenged the sovereign capacity of Rosenne and Robinson to speak for Jewish interests with authority.

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.

This and the next chapter explore the theme refuge and the ambivalence of Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne towards the 1951 Refugee Convention. This chapter assesses Robinson’s extensive involvement in drafting of the Convention. Against the backdrop of Robinson’s wartime work, as director of the New York-based Institute of Jewish Affairs, the chapter traces Robinson’s attempts to reconcile the demands of the Zionist creed with his lingering sensibilities with regard to the interests of Jewish refugees. In this regard, the chapter offers a critical reading of the degree to which Robinson was, in fact, representing the position of the Jewish state in this legislative process.