Introduction

Summary

In October 1981, two American Jewish professionals talked past one another as they reenacted a routine argument about attitudes in the Jewish world toward the United Nations (UN) and one of its chief projects, international human rights. Playing the role of cynic was thirty-nine-year-old Harris Schoenberg, recently appointed director of UN affairs for B’nai B’rith. His antithesis was seventy-four-year-old Philip Klutznick, a former president of B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and UN envoy for three separate US presidents. The issue Schoenberg put to Klutznick: UN member states were perverting human rights by exaggerating Israeli transgressions in territories it was occupying and passing resolutions decrying Jewish nationalism as racist. Ever the Pollyanna, Klutznick declared his younger colleague’s cynicism went too far. He exhorted Schoenberg to stop “expecting miracles” from an imperfect institution. Instead, Klutznick maintained, what ought to concern them was the parochialism of their ranks: “our principal trouble is that unless it is Soviet Jewry, or Israel connected, or antisemitism, we frequently think the issue is not of importance … human rights, whether they involve Jews or not, is important to all of us.” To Schoenberg, however, clinging to old mantras seemed hopelessly naïve when dealing with an institution that had become the “moral equivalent of a Nuremburg rally.” He waxed poetic about how Jewish history was defined by a creative tension between the universal and the particular, manifest in their own time between balancing support for human rights and for the restoration of Jewish sovereignty. Now, Schoenberg insisted, these “parallel Jewish impulses” were “almost at war.”¹