Commemorating Kristallnacht During an American Execution Spree

(Note: this essay appeared in its original form in the Jurist on November 9, 2026.)

Once again this year, the specter of state-sponsored murder – otherwise known as judicial execution – stains the American Jewish community’s commemoration of Kristallnacht. The German word for the “Night of Broken Glass,” Kristallnacht was an infamous pogrom that the governing Nazis, Hitler Youth, and German civilians perpetrated against the Jews across Germany eighty-eight years ago, on 9–10 November 1938. The name Kristallnacht is derived from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and buildings were smashed. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, 267 synagogues and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were attacked or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. The exact number of victims is unknown, ranging from 91 Jews murdered to a death toll in the several hundreds when considering post-arrest maltreatment and suicides. Historians view Kristallnacht as the ominous prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. 

The thousands of members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” include many individuals who, like this author and L’chaim co-founder, are direct descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors. We know more than most that state-sponsored murder via execution is not the same as the mass murder of our innocent ancestors in the Holocaust, which we memorialize on Kristallnacht. The Holocaust was a genocide of horrific and singular proportions and one that continues to impact generations of Jews and human beings. 

And yet, there are indeed synchronicities, legacies, and lessons about state killings that align the events that Kristallnacht mourns with the Nazi legacies that executions perpetuate. Since its inception five years ago, the thousands of members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” have marked other recent iterations of the horrific synchronicity of executions on Kristallnacht.  The group has written extensively about how Texas alone has twice elected to mark this date with executions, including Brent Brewer on November 9, 2023, and Tracey Lane Beatty on the same day one year prior. 

This year, that parallel has only intensified. 

The Current American Execution Spree

Just four days before the marking of Kristallnacht’s anniversary, not one but three state killings occurred throughout the United States. On November 5, Indiana officials executed Jeffrey Weisheit; Florida officials executed Jesse Guardado; and Alabama officials executed Michael Taylor. 

All three cases raise serious questions regarding the fairness of their trials and the constitutionality of their executions. In Indiana’s case, the victim’s father publicly opposed the execution of Mr. Weisheit, whose attorneys recently revealed that the Hoosier State sources its execution drugs from a pharmacy cited for safety issues. Meanwhile, in Alabama, the jury in the capital trial of nineteen-year-old defendant Michael Taylor never heard key mitigating evidence. Finally, in the Sunshine State, which has been experiencing what experts refer to as its own unprecedented execution spree under the watch of Governor Ron DeSantis, Jesse Guardado was at least the eleventh victim of a notoriously abusive state-run school to be executed. All three states plan to carry out this horror via lethal injection. 

If the fact of this triple execution day were not enough to constitute its own “spree,”  two more lethal injection executions are set to take place just three days after Kristallnacht on November 12th in Texas and Oklahoma, followed by two more still the following week on November 19th, once again in Texas and Florida. That will make for a total of seven executions in November alone. 

As the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) reports, 2026 already has featured thirty-two executions, with two more set for December. If all remaining executions move forward, the United States will have carried out, then, a total of forty-one killings in 2026. This tally follows forty-seven such killings across the country in 2025. At least one is already set for 2027. This spectacle is all taking place under the auspices of Donald J. Trump, whose execution-laden first presidential term Rolling Stone aptly described in the very same way, as “Trump’s killing spree,” and whose current second term has portended the very same. Trump’s Machiavellian machinations related to the death penalty, like the maniacal maneuverings of Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the staggering use of the noose in nations like Iran, serve as a harrowing reminder of how extremists in positions of power wield capital punishment as a deadly political tool. 

It is indeed quite fair to say that the United States is witnessing its latest veritable execution spree. For context, as far as triple execution days go in the United States, DPIC reports that there have been only fourteen days where three or more executions were carried out on the same single day since the modern resumption of capital punishment in the United States in 1977. And yet, the world witnessed in horror the most recent American triple execution day not more than three months ago on August 13, 2026, when Tennessee (Anthony Darrell Hines), Oklahoma (Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez), and Alabama (Jeremy Williams) carried out executions. That marked the first triple-execution day in the U.S. since January 7, 2010, when Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas carried out executions. (Of note, the  highest number of executions in a single day in the modern era was four, which occurred on December 9, 1999, when Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, and Virginia all carried out executions.)

The Unconscionable Nazi Legacies of Various Execution Methods

The scope and scale of all this recent state killing is overwhelming. When one considers it against the backdrop of Kristallnacht, it would appear that the world has learned nothing about the dangers of the state being involved at all in the so-called “machinery of death.” Of late, two particular manifestations of those perils have catapulted to international attention. The first came on September 30, when Tennessee torturously botched its attempted killing of Christa Pike, with whom L’chaim has corresponded for well over a year. The second was the scheduling of a military firing squad execution on the eve of Hanukkah for this upcoming December. At one point, this grotesque barbarism was slated for live-streaming. Such monstrous displays constitute inevitable consequences of giving the state the power to execute.

Yet, there is much more to consider beyond these international headlines when juxtaposing Kristallnacht and the unfolding American execution spree. One need not look beyond the execution method itself to find perhaps the most egregious manner in which the Holocaust and executions overlap. Let there be no doubt: lethal injection — the main form of execution used in the US and the method that will be used in every execution this month — is a direct Nazi legacy. The Third Reich first implemented this killing method as part of their infamous Aktion T4 protocol, using lethal injection to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” Dr. Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, developed this protocol. 

If this were not enough, American states continue to gas prisoners to death and to build gas chambers throughout the US, with at least one state allowing the use of Zyklon B, of Auschwitz infamy, to kill defenseless inmates against their will. Regular American employment of firing squads and the more recent prospect in Israel of hangings for state-killings also serve as triggering reminders of Nazi crimes.

The members of L’chaim are keenly aware of these undeniable legacies whenever a government carries out an execution, whether near Kristallnacht or on other Holocaust remembrance days throughout the year. The employment of such Nazi legacies is a slap in the face to all who would deign to learn lessons from the unparalleled conflagration of the Shoah. 

Carrying the Torch of Jewish Death Penalty Abolitionists

L’chaim members carry the torch of celebrated Jewish death penalty abolitionists such as Elie Wiesel and Martin Buber, who grasped the danger of giving the state the power to kill its prisoners long before this writer was born. As Wiesel professed: “death should never be the answer in a civilized society.” Wiesel even referred to Israel’s highly controversial 1962 execution of Nazi perpetrator Adolph Eichmann as “an example not to be followed,” while Buber called it a great “mistake.” Their testimonies, as well as those of other Jewish and non-Jewish human rights luminaries, exemplify why the shadow of the Holocaust serves as one of the most significant motivators for L’chaim members to stand against state-sponsored murder in every single case, including for the Tree of Life synagogue shooter and the terrorists who perpetrated the unfathomable massacre of October 7th, 2023.

Members of L’chaim continue to be galvanized by lofty examples of Jewish death penalty abolitionists born from the embers of the Holocaust. One such particularly eminent figure who rightfully received global attention upon his death in 2024 was former French Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, of blessed memory. The Holocaust experience of Badinter’s family was punctuated by the unfathomable murder of his father, Simon Badinter, in the Sobibor concentration camp in 1943. Emboldened by this killing and the lessons of the unparalleled conflagration of the Shoah, Badinter went on in his illustrious legal and political career to successfully advocate for the ultimate abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981, the year I was born. A recent tribute celebrating his accomplishments poignantly described that when Badinter was confronted with Klaus Barbie, the Nazi who had arrested and sent his father to his death, he proudly “stood by his opposition to the death penalty and did not wish nor seek to have his father’s killer executed. He thereby demonstrated a rare willingness to place principle over the powerful personal desire to avenge the brutal death of a beloved parent.” 

As Jewish abolitionist giants like Badinter and Wiesel knew far too well, and as L’chaim members have enumerated time and again, the Holocaust legacies of executions are but one of many reasons why there can be no place for the death penalty in Judaism, let alone in any civilized society, in the twenty-first century. May Kristallnacht’s commemoration this year serve as a reminder and warning to all states and governments that a society that condemns a human being to execution condemns itself infinitely more.  

Governor Gavin Newsom no doubt realized just this when he made the historic decision this past week to commute the sentences of all 548 individuals on California’s death row. L’chaim publicly toasted Governor Newsom for this phenomenal humanitarian feat, just as it toasted Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro when he promised to work toward death penalty abolition in that state in 2023. Members look forward to the day when L’chaim  can do the same for all other American and world leaders.

Cantor Michael J. Zoosman, MSM

Jewish Prison Chaplain

Co-Founder: L’chaim: Jews Against the Death Penalty

Advisory Committee Member: Death Penalty Action