With the expiration of copyright protections on Hitler’s political manifesto, it has been republished by a German scholarly institute, complete with extensive annotations. Contrary to the longstanding belief in Germany that the book was best kept away from the public, Peter Ross Range defends the decision to publish it:

Fears that Hitler’s feverish but rambling and repetitive writing would somehow incite a neo-Nazi revival are dismissed by most observers. The pure text has for years been posted on extremist right-wing websites, in German and other languages, and has not yet triggered a fascist groundswell. . . . For contemporary readers of any political persuasion, digging into Hitler’s overheated, simplistic theories of racial domination and his tangled 1920s foreign-policy prescriptions is more in the nature of historical homework than political inspiration.

But the homework is important, and that’s what makes the arrival of the new critical edition of Mein Kampf a positive step. Closeting the single most important original source of the Nazi enterprise is hardly the way to educate and inoculate future German generations about their country’s darkest hour. Putting the academic imprimatur on the beast somehow tames it, converting it from inflammatory political pamphlet to interesting historical artifact. Now it can be taught for what it is. . . .

With the footnotes snaking throughout the text, the new Mein Kampf more closely resembles a theological treatise than a political tract.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.