A revealing account of complex aspirations for global justice.
The history of a campaign for a universal bill of human rights that generated fierce controversy.
Between 1800 and 1940, argues historian Loeffler (History and Jewish Studies/Univ. of Virginia; The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 2010), the term “human rights” hardly appeared in international law. The phrase surfaced in the middle of World War II but had little to do with the Holocaust. As reflected in the 1948 adoption of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea was intended “to replace the discredited minority rights ideal” with a broadly applicable manifesto. Despite being “the brainchild of American policy makers and intellectuals,” the pursuit of human rights involved five Jewish leaders whom the author profiles in a thorough, well-grounded, and often surprising history: Polish-born Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, a lawyer who insisted that any declaration of human rights must be preceded by laws; American philanthropist Jacob Blaustein, a soft-spoken oil tycoon who became chairman of the American Jewish Committee; Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, a British Zionist leader; Lithuanian lawyer and newspaper publisher Jacob Robinson, “one of Europe’s foremost champions of minority rights” and “the ultimate internationalist”; and Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, a Zionist youth activist who sympathized with Palestinian Arab refugees, a convert to Catholic mysticism, and a lawyer “disenchanted with the law.” Defining and applying human rights incited vehement debate. At the first session of the Commission on Human Rights, held in 1947, members began by arguing “about the philosophical meaning of rights.” A declaration draft that emerged contained 400 pages of commentary, each revealing “more ideological clashes.” A Saudi representative denounced it “as a forcible imposition of ‘Western civilization’ on the Islamic world” because it advocated freedom of marriage and religion. Inextricably entangled in the ongoing debates was the connection of human rights to anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Middle East conflict. Zionism, recast as a “symbol of moral parochialism,” was seen “as the singular enemy of international human rights.”
A revealing account of complex aspirations for global justice.Pub Date: May 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-21724-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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