Seminars

In 1913 Maury Diggs, 26, and Farley Drew Caminetti, 27, both married men with children, traveled with two unmarried women, Marsha Warrington and Lola Norris, from California to Nevada. Both men were quickly indicted for violating the Mann Act of 1910, a federal law aimed at preventing the sexual trafficking of women. Although Warrington and Norris consented to extramarital sex and no money changed hands, the defendants were found guilty in each case, decisions ultimately confirmed by the Supreme Court, and the two men served time in federal prison. The cases highlight the use of federal authority to legislate morality, reflecting widespread anxiety that traditional American values in the newly urbanized United States faced many threats, including a huge influx of immigrants, and increasing opportunities for women.

Paul Ogorzow joined the Nazi SA, the Stormtroopers, in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler came to power, eventually becoming a squad leader. In 1934 the national railroad, Deutsche Reichsbahn, hired Ogorzow as an assistant switchman and six years later, a series of attacks on women traveling alone on the S-bahn commuter rail system began. The assaults occurred in darkness – a blackout had existed in Berlin after enemy aircraft had started bombing the city – and by July 1941 eight women had been murdered and dozens more viciously assaulted. Arthur Nebe, head of the Reich Criminal Police, launched a massive investigation into the S-bahn murders and in 1941 the Berlin police captured Ogorzow. But Nebe is best remembered as one of the architects of the Holocaust, an accomplice of Reinhard Heydrich in planning the extermination of millions. Nazi concepts of criminal policing, based on the forensic science of the day, were intimately linked to the racialization and genocide of the Nazi project.

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.

A global protest movement and international lawyers are raising the question of genocide and war crimes in relation to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. This paper will analyze these discussions and explores the attraction of the genocide concept for the protest movement.