Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948) is an attorney in New York, a human rights activist, a professor of law and a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of Holocaust survivors. He has been described on the front page of The New York Times as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He has served as national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people."

Rosensaft is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, the umbrella organization of Jewish communities around the world, based in New York. In September 2023, he stepped down as the WJC's general counsel and associate executive vice president after serving in these positions since, respectively, 2009 and 2019.

Starting in 2008, he has been adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School where he teaches courses on the law of genocide and on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence. He is also lecturer in law at Columbia University Law School, and taught for several years as a distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law. In May 2022, he was elected chairman of the Advisory Board of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation which oversees World War II memorial sites throughout the German state of Lower Saxony, including the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

Rosensaft's latest book, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, was published on January 27, 2025, following an earlier volume of his poetry, Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (Kelsay Books, 2021). He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015), The World Jewish Congress: 1936-2016 and Life Reborn: Jewish Displaced Persons 1946-1951 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, (2001).