Morris Abram’s Life-Long Struggle for Human Rights—for Jews Too

Born in a small town in Georgia to a Jewish family, Morris B. Abram (1918–2000) began his legal career assisting in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, before turning his attention to civil rights and electoral reform in his home state. He would go on to serve several presidents, lead multiple Jewish organizations—including the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the American Jewish Committee—and play a role in establishing both the office of the UN high commission on human rights and the organization UN Watch, which has worked to point of out the hypocrisy and anti-Semitism emanating from that office. Reviewing a new biography of Abram by David Lowe, Jay Lefkowitz—who worked with Abram in many capacities—writes:

Abram’s family was part of a small group of about a dozen Jewish families in Fitzgerald, [Georgia]. There was no synagogue in the town and Abram never had a bar mitzvah. But there was no way to avoid the complexities of growing up as a Jew in Georgia in the 1920s. I remember, more than a half-century after he had left the Peach State, Morris would open the dinners he hosted in Geneva with Jews and non-Jews alike by retelling the story of Leo Frank, the young Jewish man who was framed for the murder of the thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta and then hanged by a lynch mob three years before Abram was born.

Though he later became an active supporter of the state of Israel, in his youth he was anti-Zionist. He also had no interest in joining a Jewish fraternity when he entered the University of Georgia in 1934 and recalled in later years that he was “far too proud to assimilate with Gentiles” and “too ‘anti-Semitic’ to associate with exclusionary Jews.” Lowe reveals that when Abram was invited to join a Jewish fraternity, he responded that “he was personally opposed to groups that were segregated by race or religion.” That sentiment, vehemently anti-exclusionary and color-blind, became familiar to me in the course of the countless conversations I had with Morris about race relations.

Because he was a tireless advocate for civil rights and anti-discrimination, he was also a steadfast opponent of affirmative action and racial quotas of any kind. Though he had no formal Jewish education, was completely non-observant, and intermarried twice, he led major Jewish organizations in some of their most pivotal moments and was a passionate Zionist for the last quarter-century of his life. He served with enthusiasm under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, and then later with equal vigor for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American Jewish History, American South, Civil rights movement, Nuremberg Trials, United Nations

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society