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