What if the tools that shaped your life’s work were rooted in unimaginable evil?
In this haunting episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Dr. Howard Alan Israel to discuss Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil, a book born from a single, shattering moment in an operating room. For over twenty years, Dr. Israel had prepared for surgeries using the same anatomy atlas—methodically studying each illustration, planning for every variation, and building a career marked by innovation, research, and the training of future surgeons. Then a colleague changed everything with one sentence: the atlas had been created by Nazi doctors.
That revelation launched a thirty-year journey into the moral abyss—an investigation into who these anatomists were, who their “subjects” had been, and how healers became murderers. Dr. Israel began to confront terrifying questions: Was his career built, in part, on the suffering of victims? How could such knowledge remain hidden in plain sight for decades? And how does a profession devoted to healing become an instrument of genocide?
Together, Rabbi Katz and Dr. Israel explore not only the historical horror of Nazi medicine, but the urgent bioethical questions it raises today. As genocide remains a recurring human reality, this conversation asks what must change in our moral frameworks, institutions, and education to prevent the transformation of healers into agents of destruction—and how we might instead build a society committed to healing rather than harm.
Rabbi Marc Katz is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life.
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