(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)November 10, 2012

(MAHWAH, NJ) – The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of Ramapo College and Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom held a Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) commemoration on Saturday, November 10 at Beth Haverim Shir Shalom in Mahwah, New Jersey.

The commemoration featured a talk by Dr. Douglas G. Morris on “Discrimination, Degradation, Defiance: Jewish Lawyers in Nazi Germany.”

Among the first targets of the Nazis after their assumption of power in January 1933 were Jewish attorneys. The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933 excluded them from state service. So-called Aryan Paragraphs instituted by professional organizations meant that they could no longer be members of the German bar association. In Berlin, which had the country’s largest Jewish population, among whom were many lawyers, the municipal authorities issued an ordinance forbidding them to work on legal matters. Nazi organs quickly instituted less formal campaigns to deter non-Jews from seeking the services of Jewish legal professionals. Soon Jewish lawyers, like physicians, were limited to serving only the needs of their increasingly marginalized co-religionists.

Douglas G. Morris is a legal historian and practicing criminal defense attorney with Federal Defenders of New York, Inc.He is now working on a book, tentatively entitled Discrimination, Degradation, Defiance: Jewish Lawyers in Nazi Germany.This book will explore the response of lawyers, both in their legal practice and their legal thinking, to a tyrannical regime’s destruction of a liberal legal order.His first book, Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2005), explored the heroic and principled struggle of a Jewish attorney who was Munich’s leading courtroom advocate during the Weimar Republic, revealing the skewed and politicized nature of Germany’s judicial system even before Hitler came to power.

Mr. Morris was awarded a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Rochester in 2003 and a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 1983.At Federal Defenders, he represents defendants charged with federal crimes.Before Federal Defenders, he worked as a litigation associate in the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, N.Y.In 2001-02, he was a Fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullmann Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library.

The evening also included a commemorative service led by Rabbi Joel Mosbacher anda program featuring choral music performed by the adult choir of Temple Beth Haverim Shir Shalom under the direction of Cantor David Perper.

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