Shvab George (1931, Liepāja) ― ghetto survivor, historian, public figure.
He was born into the family of a physician. From the start of the German occupation he was a prisoner of the Liepāja ghetto, and later of the Kaiserwald and Stutthof camps.
He was liberated by British forces in May 1945.
After brief schooling at Jewish schools in Hamburg and a suburb of Berlin, in February 1947 he emigrated to the USA. He attended secondary school in Brooklyn, and in 1949 became a student at the City College of New York, which, after a six-month internship in Israel, he completed with honors in 1954.
He received his master's and doctoral degrees in political science from Columbia University in 1955 and 1968 respectively.
From 1959 he taught political and historical science at Columbia University, then at the City University of New York, where in 1980 he was granted the rank of full professor. In 1974, together with the patriarch of international relations studies, Professor H. Morgenthau, he became co-founder and vice-president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, which became one of the leading institutions shaping the course of American diplomacy. From 1993 ― president of this Committee, he organized closed-door negotiations, kept from the general public, with diplomats and statesmen of “difficult” states such as North Korea and China, laying the groundwork for further negotiations by senior US officials. For more than thirty years he was editor of the journal “American Foreign Policy Interests,” recognized by politicians and diplomats as one of the most influential journals in the field of international affairs. He also edits the series “Global Perspectives in History and Politics,” published by Greenwood Press.
He has spoken many times at international political forums in various countries, explaining the concept he developed of the Open Society Bloc. He is the author, editor, and translator of numerous books and articles. His book “The Challenge of the Exception” was especially well received, and was translated into Italian and Japanese, and later Chinese. He is co-founder and permanent vice-president of the society “Jewish Survivors of Latvia.”
He is a member of several committees of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, a member of the commission of international historians under the President of Latvia, and vice-president of the American Sholem Aleichem Society. He was awarded the “Ellis Island” Medal of Honor (1998), as well as Latvia's highest honor, the Order of the Three Stars (2002).

Works: United States Foreign Policy At The Crossroads. New York: Greenwood Press, 1982; The Leviathan In The State Theory Of Thomas Hobbes. New York: Greenwood Press, 1996; Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press, 2005; The Challenge of the Exception. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

I. Brod