30 | JANUARY 7 • 2021
New book illustrates how
institutions failed to protect
victims of sexual assault.
HOWARD LOVY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Bystanders
and Enablers
ARTS&LIFE
BOOKS
A
uthor Amos N.
Guiora’s parents sur-
vived the Holocaust,
but the subject was never dis-
cussed when he was growing
up. It wasn’t until
much later in life,
when a non-Jew-
ish friend asked
him the simple
question of how
the Holocaust
happened, that
he set out on a quest to dis-
cover what his parents went
through.
“
And the more I read,”
Guiora said in an interview
with the Jewish News, “I
realized there was one issue
that had never really been
addressed — and that was the
bystanders.”
Guiora, a law professor
at the University of Utah
who grew up in Ann Arbor,
published The Crime of
Complicity: The Bystander in
the Holocaust in 2017, but he
soon found out that he was
not finished asking questions
involving bystanders to, and
enablers of, horrific acts. It
was not a big leap for Guiora
to apply the same kind of
analysis to modern crimes of
complicity.
Guiora said his just-released
book, Armies of Enablers:
Survivor Stories of Complicity
and Betrayal in Sexual Assaults
(ABA Publishing, September
2020), was, in fact, welcomed
by survivors because, for a
change, a writer focused not
on the criminals, but on the
institutions that failed to pro-
tect the victims.
Armies of Enablers focuses
on a number of sexual assault
cases, including young women
on the USA Gymnastics team
who were repeatedly molested
by Larry Nassar, a doctor at
Michigan State University.
He also spoke to survivors
of sexual assault from Penn
State University, Ohio State
University and within the
Catholic Church. As it was in
his Holocaust book, he iden-
tified a triangle of complicity
that connects the survivor
with both the bystander and
the enabler.
“In that sense, there is a
clear connection between the
two books,” he said. “I’m not
focused at all on the perpe-
trator. I leave the perpetrator
to others to write about. That
doesn’t interest me. I asked the
men and women who I inter-
viewed a question that is so
obvious to me that hadn’t been
previously asked. And that
was, ‘What were your expecta-
tions of the neighbor?’”
And that is the reason the
victims were eager to speak
with him, he said. They
jumped at the opportunity to
talk about “the complicity of
the institution” that was sup-
posed to have protected them.
ISRAEL AND BACK AGAIN
Guiora knows what it’s like
to feel threatened. After the
release of his Holocaust book,
he was shocked at the very
graphic antisemitic death
threats he received. It became
so frightening that the police
recommended he change his
daily routine to avoid possible
assassination. In the end, he
decided, “I won’t give in to
those bastards,” he said.
“The Holocaust denier
world is alive and well. Yeah.
I’m well aware of the fact that
some of these guys are violent,
well aware of that. But in no
way does it deter me.”
This determination could
have been the result of 20
years spent with the Israel
Defense Forces. Guiora was
born in Israel in 1957, but his
family moved to Ann Arbor
in 1964, when his father was
on faculty at the University
of Michigan. He still attends
University of Michigan foot-
ball games (when possible)
and has a giant picture of the
Big House on his living room
wall.
He went to grade school in
Ann Arbor, but moved back to
Israel in 1985. “I volunteered
on a kibbutz between my first
and second year of law school,
and I had no intention of
making aliyah or anything like
that. But I got bitten by the
bug of Zionism.”
Amos N.
Guiora