58 No. 76 JUSTICE crux of “genocide” as the erasure of culture rather than merely the killing of members of a specific group. From this perspective, the erasure of cultures is an act of depriving humankind of its multi-faceted nature, and thus an attack on humankind as a whole, and not “just”an attack on the specific target group. Through an examination of four personalities who focused on the cultural losses of the Jewish People in the Holocaust, three of them in relation to the Eichmann Trial, Bilsky tries to see the extent to which this aspect played a role in that trial and how it can be revived in current discourse. For her study, Bilsky consulted primary sources in a variety of archives: the Salo Baron Papers at Stanford; the Jacob Robinson files in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem; the Sutzkever collection in YIVO in New York; the Eichmann Trial records; various files in the Israel State Archive and the Israel National Library in Jerusalem; the Ben Gurion Archive in the Ben Gurion Heritage Center in Sde Boker; and materials in the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The book is divided into an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. Chapter One is fairly concise and approaches Lemkin’s concept from a legal perspective: why he coined and published the term “genocide” and the actual results of his initiative. While this aspect is not new, the short overview is helpful. Bilsky emphasizes the main point that she wants to promote in the book: Lemkin’s emphasis on the cultural dimension of genocide. She writes: Lemkin emphasizes that in order to destroy a group the destruction to the core of its identity is needed — its language, its books, its religious and ritual objects: to erase its notion from the earth. Therefore, according to Lemkin’s view, the essence of genocide is first and foremost cultural — a systematic attack on a group of people and its cultural identity, a crime which is aimed at the principle of being different (p. 24). Bilsky also uses the chapter to focus on James Loeffler’s interesting finding in 2021: in 1957, two years before his death, Lemkin published a poem written in biblical Hebrew called “Genocide” in the leftist Israeli newspaper ‘Al haMishmar, which was the mouthpiece of the Mapam party and Hashomer Hatza’ir movement.6 She tries to understand why the poem was written in biblical rather than modern Hebrew, and analyzes the messages it conveys. The second chapter deals with Abraham Sutzkever, the partisan and Yiddish poet from Vilna (also known as Vilnius). Bilsky begins with his testimony in the major Nuremberg Trial (the International Military Tribunal), on behalf of the Soviet prosecution. She shows that Sutzkever, who was the only witness in that trial, was motivated to emphasize how the Nazis’ crimes had a clear and stated cultural component: erasing Yiddish culture. In turn, he also expressed frustration at the Soviet prosecutor’s limited focus on the physical aspects of the Nazis’ crimes and omission of any cultural motivations. Sutzkever came on aliyah shortly after the Shoah and was active in efforts to preserve the legacy and even revive Yiddish culture. He was apparently therefore even more frustrated by the fact that after its establishment, the State of Israel continued to view Yiddish as a rival. Consequently, the erasure of Yiddish culture did play a role in the Eichmann Trial, which was presented as a “correction” to the Nuremberg trial from the perspective of Israel as the Jewish nation state. Once again, the prosecution — this time the Israeli one — disregarded the cultural genocide carried out in the Shoah. Chapter Three, the longest in the book, focuses on the Jewish-American historian Salo Baron, who was asked by the prosecution to serve as an expert witness and provide a historical overview of modern Jewry on the eve of destruction. Bilsky points to the differing procedural goals of this testimony. Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor, expected Baron to present objective “historical facts” without topics that are “too boring,” alluding to broad historical depictions and interpretations. Baron demanded that he be free to decide what should be presented as essential for understanding the historical background of the Shoah (p. 86). 5. This has become widespread; for an intelligent response, see Norman J. W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf, “Why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a ‘genocide.’” THE WASHINGTON POST, June 3, 2025, available at https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/03/israelgaza-genocide-allegations/; see also, various articles in JUSTICE 71, Spring 2024; Robbie Sabel, supra note 3, available at https://www.ijl.org/justicem/no71/24/ 6. James Loeffler and Leora Bilsky, “A Poem that Shows How to Remember the Holocaust,” THE ATLANTIC, April 8, 2021, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2021/04/how-remember-holocaust/618538/
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