Scott Gilmore was majoring in Jewish studies at Montreal’s McGill University when he discovered the potency of Yiddish literature to confront crimes against humanity — and realized his life’s calling.
“I found writers who grappled with how to speak the unspeakable and make meaning out of atrocity,” says Gilmore, now a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability. “I focused on modernist Yiddish literature as a response to political violence and mass trauma. It’s a mission I struggle with myself as a war-crimes lawyer.”
That mission includes taking on a man considered one of the contemporary world’s worst war criminals — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Gilmore is spearheading a civil suit in a U.S. court seeking damages from the Syrian government for the 2012 death of American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in a bombing raid in the city of Homs.
Gilmore, speaking Oct. 20 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, said a CJA investigation showed that Colvin, 56, was targeted by Syrian forces because of her reporting.
The resulting suit — filed in July by Colvin’s relatives in a federal court in Washington, D.C., where Gilmore is based — seeks compensatory and punitive damages. Assad told NBC News that his government had not targeted Colvin, that Syrian forces didn’t know who she was, and that “she’s responsible for everything that befell her” because she entered Syria illegally.
Gilmore and Beth Van Schaack, a visiting professor in human rights at Stanford Law School, told about 50 audience members at the JCC that the Colvin suit was one of the few ways of holding the Assad government accountable.
Russia blocks any cases against Syria from reaching the International Criminal Court, so the Colvin case was filed under a U.S. law that allows suits against entities the State Department designates as state sponsors of terrorism.
“It’s a narrow case, it’s a single victim, but it’s emblematic of what’s we’re seeing” on a large scale in Syria, Van Schaack said.
Gilmore said the suit is a chance to seek justice for the “tens of thousands of people tortured to death within Syrian detention centers.”
“We are using this lawsuit as a platform,” he said. “Syria is a humanitarian tragedy of such a scale that it challenges the system of international law and justice that has been in place since World War II.”
Gilmore, 37, a native of Baltimore, said in an email interview that he is of mixed Jewish and Presbyterian heritage: “I was exposed to both faiths, raised with a strong sense of social justice and international solidarity grounded in Jewish culture, and yelled at in Yiddish when I made trouble.”
His work in human rights prevents him from playing much these days with his klezmer band, Black Ox Orkestar, which focuses on late 19th and early 20th century Eastern European music. For now, his priority is to hold war criminals accountable.
“My work investigating atrocity crimes is inspired by the Nuremberg legacy and the 20th century Jewish commitment to confront mass atrocities wherever committed,” he said. “That’s still the mission that guides me.”