Jewish Memory and the Human Right to Petition, 1933–50

While it might be expected that Jewish activists operating at the United Nations would have been the first to bury painful memories associated with the League’s failure to intervene against Nazi Germany, they in fact were among the few who tried to derive positive lessons from this experience for the future shape of the UN. Nowhere was this more apparent than the ways in which they drew on the memory of a hollow victory, the 1933 Bernheim Petition, to argue for the importance of the right to petition the international body. Focusing on a handful of American, British and French Jewish activists who operated at both the League and the UN allows us to unsettle dominant historiographical binaries between “interwar” and “postwar” and between “human rights” and “minority rights.” The largely indifferent response these Jewish actors received from government representatives to their ideas also provides an early case in which the particular suffering of the Jews failed to translate into a universal language for claims-making. As such, this episode conforms to recent attempts to decouple the post-1945 human rights regime from the Holocaust.