News

On November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, once prime real estate for torchlit Nazi pageantry, currently reduced to ruins by Allied bombing, the International Military Tribunal, an unprecedented experiment in transnational jurisprudence, convened in the city’s Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings left standing. The four victorious powers — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — had hauled the loser, Nazi Germany, before four judges and a global jury to be held accountable for violating a series of recently devised additions to the criminal code — crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, criminal conspiracy, and war crimes.

Twenty-one Nazi leaders were in the dock, defendants whose names most Americans had become familiar with in the years since 1933. The accused included Reich Marshall Herman Göring, Hitler’s brutal second in command; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in August 1939 negotiated the pact with the Soviet Union that ignited the conflagration; Rudolf Hess,...

Though “The Plot Against America” took its time to get going, it’s full steam ahead for David Simon’s Philip Roth adaptation by Episode 4 — but to what end? With just two episodes to go, the drama has certainly flared up: The Levin familial bonds are being pushed to the brink as Sandy falls increasingly under Lindbergh’s spell, with the help of Aunt Evelyn and her new boyfriend Rabbi Bengelsdorf. The lines have been drawn, and it’s not looking good for either side. While this was by far the most exciting episode so far, it still feels as though Simon is obligingly following Roth’s outline rather than forging his own path.

In both the novel and the series “The Plot Against America,” there’s an unmentioned but implicit rhetorical question reaching out from beyond the page and screen. To borrow from the musical “Cabaret,” one of the...