A Tradition in Crisis
Human Rights and Jewish Politics Reconsidered
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26443/jcreor.v6i1.123Keywords:
Judaism, Human Rights, Zionism, Liberalism, Israeli-Palestinian ConflictAbstract
2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration on Judaism and Human Rights, issued by a distinguished group of international jurists, rabbis, and scholars at the 1974 McGill International Colloquium on Judaism and Human Rights. This article traces the emergence of a specifically Jewish religious human rights tradition to that moment of political crisis in the globalized Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Out of Montreal came three different meta-narratives about the relationship between Judaism and human rights each of which reflects a deep entanglement with questions of Zionism: a progressive humanism that stresses the unavoidable question of how Jewish rights and Palestinian rightlessness intersect; a revisionist conservatism that equates Jewish human rights with Zionist power; and a liberal antipolitics that seeks to partition Jewish human rights thought and activism from Zionism, freeing Jews from direct implication in the human rights crisis engulfing Israel and Palestine. Each of these meta-narratives is reflected in three different interpretations of the famous biblical verse that is a mainstay of contemporary Jewish human rights discourse: “Justice, justice, you shall pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deut. 16:20 [JPS]). The article closes by offering a fourth, alternative reading of the verse as a way to imagine a possible future for Jewish human rights.
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