Personal memoir reflections on human rights and Jewish identity

4.2.12 WC: 191694 people, even those you disagree with or despise. The membership roles of both “clubs” are, tragically, quite small under this criteria, though many claim their honorific mantles. Being a member of the “Human Rights Club” does not require abstaining from advocacy for one’s own group (however defined). But it does require more universal advocacy as well. The “motto” for the club might well be the famous dictum of Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?” I have tried hard to live by these words—which hang on the wall in my office—and to maintain my membership in the Human Rights Club, although my priorities have changed with shifting threats to particular groups over time. As a young lawyer, I witnessed little threat to the Jewish community in America, despite lingering anti-Semitism in law firms, social clubs, and some universities and neighborhoods. I fought against these remnants of bigotry, but it was clear that the trend was in the right direction: top- down anti-Semitism and elite discrimination against Jews were on the way out. Jews did not need my help. By this time, 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 the children.” For me, it was the opposite. As my children got old enough to ask questions, I realized that I had remained observant only to please my parents. I did not want to impose that obligation on my children. I remained deeply Jewish in a secular sense—whatever that may mean—and my children were Bat and Bar Mitzvahed and attended Jewish Sunday School, but my life no longer centered around my identity as a Jew. Nor did my legal career. Early in my legal career, my first wife, who was also an Orthodox Jew, and I were divorced. I assumed primary responsibility for the raising of our two sons. A decade after the divorce I met and soon married Carolyn, who was raised as a sometime Reform and sometime Conservative Jew in Charleston, South Carolina. Together we live a life dedicated to more secular Jewish values. I dedicated my first book about my brand of Judaism—Chutzpah—to Carolyn. Carolyn’s family participated in the struggle for civil rights in Charleston, and we are both deeply committed to universal human rights. In the early phase of my career, I didn’t focus on Jewish rights or on Israel. There were bigger and more serious problems facing America, particularly with regard to race. There were also more serious problems around the world: Apartheid in South Africa; repression in the Soviet Union, China, South America and Saudi Arabia; an unjust war being fought by my own country in Vietnam. I threw myself into these causes (as well as into the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty). 320 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017407