Every indexed document

which is the critical social issue of our time?”

” but would “look at these issues in a detached

and the legal issues growing out of it.”

I didn’t focus on Jewish rights or on Israel. There were bigger and more serious problems facing America

I had stopped being a strictly observant Orthodox Jew. My synagogue attendees had become episodic and my involvement in the Jewish community peripheral. The reason was my children. Many people became more religiously committed “because of t...

I began to explore the meaning of the term “human rights

my involvement in the human rights movement broadened

most of my focus was on domestic civil rights. I marched

my class made several visits to the U.N.

209 expressed opposition to world calendar reform on religious grounds. These were the result of a postcard campaign instituted by the Inter-Yeshiva HS Council.

sit-ins or lawsuits. But it succeeded. The UN dropped the proposal and our small group got credit in the media. Here is how the New York Post—my community’s “newspaper of record” in those days—reported our success beneath the headline

I wish to express my opposition to the World Calendar Reform proposal soon to come before the United Nations. This proposal

I reached out to Seventh-Day Adventists (who joined our efforts)

because it would change the natural order of when the Jewish Sabbath fell. Under the conventional calendar

which earned me both the respect and the concern of my frightened parents

why not? It had been founded in the wake of the allied victory over Nazism by nations—mostly democracies—that had been on the right side of the war against Germany

Rene Casin and Albert Schweitzer. Our great hope was the United Nations with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our mantra was FDR’s “Four Freedoms:” freedom of speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from want; freedom f...

but the vast majority of the world’s population has no such legal protection. Human rights are not limited by geographic or political borders. They apply

and act as if your belief were the least popular.

focus on the political ones during the campaign.