Law, literature and the Holocaust collide in CMU professor’s new book
Probing the disciplines, and the manners in which each operates, generates an understanding of human endeavors and history
In an effort to further a field he helped pioneer, Richard Weisberg is looking back.
The visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University recently authored “Law, Literature, and History: A Fateful Rendezvous with the Shoah.” Published March 27 by Brill Nijhoff, the 200-page text represents Weisberg’s continued parsing of fictional writings for historical insights.
Weisberg, 80, has long been recognized for his scholarship and pragmatic contributions to law and literature. For decades, the professor and lawyer has mined works like Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” for deeper understandings of both human behavior and the kinship of composition and jurisprudence.
In his newest work, Weisberg continues that pursuit but with an eye toward the Holocaust. By explicating William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer,” Günter Grass’ “The Tin Drum” and other literary pieces, Weisberg argues that a “clash” of religious values precipitated the Holocaust.
The author’s claim builds on his earlier work, including “Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France,” in which he demonstrated how lies about Jews eventually became accepted legal and philosophical positions during World War II.
The Pittsburgh-based lawyer, who serves as professor emeritus of constitutional law at Cardozo School of Law and was named by former President Barack Obama to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad in 2014, has spent much of his career working on behalf of Holocaust victims and their heirs.
Weisberg’s earlier writings demonstrated how more than 200 French laws passed by the Vichy government during World War II resulted in persecution, restriction of property rights and the deportation and death of 75,000 French Jews.
Upon his retirement from Cardozo in 2021, Melanie Leslie, dean of the law school, said Weisberg’s work “has helped shape our understanding of human rights, specifically with respect to the horrors of the Holocaust, and has made important contributions to modern legal and ethical theory.”
Five years after moving to Pittsburgh post-retirement, Weisberg said, he was compelled to write more about law, literature and its relationship to the Shoah “partly in response to the horrible events of Oct. 7 and their aftermath.”
Although work on the book predated Hamas’ invasion of Israel in 2023, and the text is not a direct response to the ongoing war, the “upsurge of antisemitism” that followed Oct. 7 necessitated a return to exploring the “ugliness of the Holocaust,” he said.
Themes within the book, such as the complexities of human conduct, touch upon subjects Weisberg has long addressed. Since the late 1970s, he has pushed scholars and the wider public to consider the link between law and literature.
The two subjects aren’t often thought of together, but practitioners of both disciplines use “words as clearly and effectively as they can to influence audiences,” Weisberg said. “Going back to the Bible — and when I say the Bible, I mean the Tanakh — storytelling and law are interwoven brilliantly. The Romans also had a sense of that unity through a figure like Cicero, who was a great rhetorician and lawyer.”
Probing the disciplines, and the manners in which each operates, generates an understanding of human endeavors and history, he explained.
Law is largely considered an effective means of ensuring action, but “over time, stories are a more meaningful and influential vehicle,” Weisberg said.
Characters who have experienced “unjust outcomes,” such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Dmitri Karamazov and Albert Camus’ Meursault, help create a sense of skepticism about law, but “law itself, at least in my view, remains untouched. It’s the human actors who get things wrong.”
One look no farther than Jewish tradition, Weisberg continued, to detect this supreme “reverence” for law.
Writing in his new book, he claimed, “My belief that the Jewish allegiance to Law is the single marker of ethical soundness on earth compared to chaos, distortion, trickery, narrative violence and the death of innocents.”
Weisberg said he plans on speaking more about the topic and “Law, Literature, and History: A Fateful Rendezvous with the Shoah” during an April 27 event at Beth Samuel Jewish Center in Ambridge.
Until then, he said he’s simply a “guy who now lives in Pittsburgh, who is new to the community but very interested in expanding his ties.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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