April 7, 2019
All Day
Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus, 1125 College Ave., Columbus, OH 43209
Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
The 31st Pearl and Troy Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law
James Loeffler
Professor of Jewish History
University of Virginia
The year 2018 marked the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today.
James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism.
Supported by the Feibel family; co-sponsored by OSU's Moritz School of Law and Jewish Columbus. Special thanks to Judy and Merom Brachman for additional support of this program in memory of James Feibel.