In December 2024, Amos Guiora, a professor at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law, received an email that made him do a double-take. The subject line was the name of his grandfather, murdered in Auschwitz in May 1944. His first thought: Spam. But after answering three identifying questions in the affirmative, he learned that four volumes of the Talmud his grandfather had taken to Auschwitz were discovered in the private library of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Streicher, who was hanged after the Nuremberg trials, had amassed 10,000 books, including these.
Guiora, whose academic focus is on bystanders and enablers - initially in the Holocaust, then in sexual assault and child abuse cases - is now turning his attention to how enablers facilitated atrocities. His forthcoming book, "Enablers: Normalizing the Unimaginable" (due August), examines Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's enablers, who he says are responsible for gutting the rule of law and refusing to negotiate hostage releases with Hamas. Another book, "Victory, Redemption, and Legal Responsibility: By Bystanding We Enabled" (expected 2028), argues that enablers, not just perpetrators, must be held legally accountable for crimes like the Holocaust, sexual assault, and hostage-taking.
This latest project is part detective story, part personal reckoning. Guiora will trace the journey of those four volumes from his grandfather's home in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, to Auschwitz, then to Streicher's library in Nuremberg, and finally to him. He plans to travel to Auschwitz for the first time, as well as to eastern Hungary and Germany, to understand not just how his grandparents were murdered but how the books ended up with a Nazi propagandist.
The book weaves in three uncomfortable questions: Did bystanders understand what was happening to their Jewish neighbors in real time? What role did they play in the destruction of European Jewry? And how culpable are they? Guiora is especially interested in the role of rabbis who insisted their congregants not leave Hungary for what is now Israel until the Messiah arrives - a decision that, in his view, enabled tragedy. His own great-grandfather, a member of the Satmar Hassidic sect, forbade his grandmother and grandfather from leaving Hungary in 1939. They were deported and murdered.
Guiora insists this isn't just about morality. He wants legal accountability for enablers, arguing that without an ecosystem of enabling, perpetrators can't act with impunity. "Bystanding, the sin of omission, only guarantees that history will repeat itself," he writes. As Holocaust denial, minimization, and modern antisemitism spike, he sees these books as a call to action - and a chance for redemption, if readers pay attention.