Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, delivered the inaugural Tzedek Lecture on Saturday at the University of Oregon. Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center and opening a three-day symposium on genocide, the lecture featured a pointed critique of U.S. foreign policy regarding genocidal events.

Power, a former war correspondent and professor of human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government [spoke] to a crowd of more than 300, nearly 50 of whom watched the lecture on a closed-circuit television in another room on the second floor. Power stated that the American government, despite rhetoric to the contrary, is too often unwilling to intervene in genocidal campaigns for fear of being dragged into a political and military quagmire. Even taking basic steps to prevent rogue regimes from slaughtering civilians, such as jamming radio frequencies to block calls for ethnic violence in Rwanda, for example, puts countries “on the hook” to continue and even escalate their commitments, she said.

“There is something pathetically incommensurate between denouncing genocide on the one hand, and proposing radio jamming on the other, when you are the most powerful country in the history of mankind,” she said.

This fear of involvement, according to Power, results in the inaction so often seen in America, as well as nations of western Europe, in the face of known atrocities.

The symposium and Tzedek Lecture series was created as a way of continuing the efforts of the 1996 conference “Ethics After the Holocaust.” That conference led to the creation of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon.