NEJS 141B – HUMAN RIGHTS: LAW, POLITICS, THEOLOGY
Spring 2015
Instructor: Yehudah Mirsky
Office hours: Th, 11-12, or by appointment, Mandel 318
Teaching Fellow: Robert DeBoard
Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Genesis 4:9)
One should not treat Cain’s response as a mockery of God, or as a response of a little boy: ‘This is not me, this is him.’ Cain’s response is sincere. Only the ethical is absent there; the answer is solely from ontology; I am I and he is he. We are beings ontologically separate. (Emmanuel Levinas)
After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian forces padre [chaplain] asked me how, after all I had seen and experiences, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. (Romeo Dallaire)
Learning Goals: In this course we will try – through a mix of reading, lecture, classroom discussion and a lively forum on our Latte page, to acquire a meaningful acquaintance with much of the contemporary work that proceeds under the rubric of human rights, gain some understanding of how this enterprise arose over the last centuries to the present, and try to think critically about some of its underlying tendencies and assumptions. Methodologically we will try to coordinate readings in history, philosophy, theology, politics and law, bringing them into mutually supportive focus that will yield a clearer picture of this very important and regularly misunderstood enterprise.
“Human rights” has in many ways become in many ways the lingua franca of our time. An ever-expanding panoply of treaties, governmental, non-governmental, and a large alphabet soup of official and unofficial international organizations are devoted to promoting human rights across the globe, and an army of academics trails alongside. Yet some fundamental ambiguities and questions abide: why did this enterprise, which claims to speak in the name of timeless truth, arise only in recent history, perhaps only in recent decades? What are its conceptual foundations? How does it relate to other forms of politics and policy? Can it speak in the terms of religious traditions with roots much older than modernity? Is it its own kind of religious belief? Is “human rights” really the best word for all the activities – advocacy, international law, democracy building, humanitarianism – that are undertaken under its umbrella? And has it at all succeeded where it counts, in alleviating man-made,regime driven human suffering?
These are huge questions, and in the course of a single semester all we can do is scratch the surface and begin to explore some avenues of inquiry. But you have to start somewhere.
We will begin with a survey of the range of human rights institutions and actors at work in the world today. We will then take a step back and try to develop an historical picture of how all of this came to be. We start in the present before moving back to the past in order to keep asking ourselves just what are the roots of the human rights framework as we know it today and if it could have developed in other directions. We will pay special attention to the role of Jewish historical experience in the fostering of human rights, and to some of the basic human rights questions attending the creation and development of the State of Israel.
With our historical and contemporary surveys in hand we can turn to the philosophical –and perhaps theological – underpinnings of human rights theory and practice today. First, we will look at two, powerful and different, philosophical justifications for the enterprise. Then, we will turn to one specific religious tradition, namely Judaism, and explore a range of efforts by different thinkers to relate human rights discourse to Jewish thought and practice.
Finally, we will return to the present, and examine a number of contemporary issues in light of all we have read and discussed, and see if we can come up with some workable understandings of human rights in our time.
The syllabus may well be modified in the course of the semester as we move together through reading and discussion.
A word or two about our work together: All of us learn by listening, by discussion, by reflection and by action. Classrooms are one kind of space for learning and getting the most out of them, making them most congenial to shared learning is an ongoing challenge. To that end, I ask that you not bring your laptops to class. We will designate a rotation for note-taking by laptop so that we will have a set of electronic notes, which will be posted on the Supplementary materials section of Latte. You will also find there an essay by a leading scholar of social media discussing why he chooses not to have laptops and other devices in his classroom. I genuinely believe that this will help us foster a shared space for attention and improve our class’ sense of community. If this poses real difficulty for you please feel free to talk to me about it.
And speaking of classroom community, I want to meet individually with each of you in the first weeks of the semester, during my office hours or at another mutually convenient time, to get a sense of you and your interests (even if we have met and spoken before). In my experience, this helps make both class work and written assignments and exams much easier all the way around.
Your grade will consist of:
30% -ongoing classroom participation. This includes a) participating in classroom discussion, b) posting brief, but regular comments on the readings in the Forum sections of on the course’s Latte Page, at least 15 times in the course of the semester
15% - writing a 1000 word reflection essay on one or more of the readings, due on March 19 (details to be discussed in class)
152% - classroom presentation – towards the end of the semester, each of you will be expected to give a brief (15-20) minute presentation on the topics broached by the final readings or another chapter in the textbooks, perhaps, but not necessarily, related to current events, relating it to what we have done thus far in the semester, accompanied by a brief written essay on the topic
40% - a take-home, final exam essay.
Required Texts:
Michael Galchinsky, Dancing at Three Weddings: Jews and Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)
Michael Goodhart, ed. Human Rights: Politics and Practice, 2d edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) [hereinafter Goodhart]
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007)
Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013)
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010)
For the Final Exam:
Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013)
All other texts will be available on Latte
UNIT ONE: CONTEMPORARY SURVEY
This unit will offer a tour d’horizon of contemporary human rights institutions and practices.
Week One
Philip Gourevitch, “Mass Murder Begins with People like Us: An interview with Thierry Cruvellier” New Yorker, May 15, 2014
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 1-44, 401-414
Week Two
Goodhart, Introduction
Basic documents: ALL ON LATTE -- UDHR, ICCPR, ICESR, Genocide Convention, Vienna Final Document
Mission Statements of Amnesty International,, Freedom House, Open Society Institutes Human Rights Watch
US State Department, Country Reports for Human Rights Practices 2013, Overview and Introduction
US State Department, Advancing Freedom and Democracy Report, 2014
Chapter 4, “Human Rights in International Law”
Chapter 5, “Human Rights in Comparative Politics”
Chapter 18, “Torture”
As you read these chapters – and others from Goodhart in the course of the semester – pay careful attention to how the various articles navigate the line between describing human rights ideas, practices and institutions, and advocating for them.
UNIT TWO: HISTORY, ORIGINS, GENEALOGIES
These introductory readings discuss the creation of modern politics in the Protestant Reformation, and complicate conventionally neat understandings of religion and secularism. We will move through the modern period to the emergence of human rights in the postwar years and its flourishing in the 1970s and 80s. We will also begin to train a focused look at Jewish historical experience.
Week Three
Basic texts – Greenberg, ‘Some Postulates of Biblical Criminal Law”
Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. Kant (“perpetual peace” “what is enlightenment?”
Rousseau, Social Contract, Book I, chapters 1,2,6,7,8
Haakonen, “Natural Law” from Routledge Encyclopedia of Ethics
Mark Lilla, “The Great Separation,”from The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (Random House, 2007)
Charles Taylor, “Western Secularism,” in Craig Calhoun, ed. Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Week Four
Gauchet, “Rights of Man,” from Dictionaryof the French Revolution
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2008)
David Brion Davis, Slavery andHumanProgress (Oxford University Press, 1984), part 3 ("Abolishing Slavery and Civilizing the World"), pp. 228-320
Week Five
Jacob Katz, “Post-Emancipation Development of Rights: Liberalism and Universalism,” in David Sidorsky ed. Essays on Human Rights: Contemporary Issues and Jewish Perspectives (Jewish Publication Society, 1979), pp. 282-296
Abigail Green, “The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?” Past and Present(2008)199 (1):175-205
Idem, “Rethinking Sir Moses Montefiore: Religion, Nationhood, and International Philanthropy in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 11 (June 2005), pp. 631-658
Tusan, “Human Rights and the Armenian Genocide”
March 8 – Guest Lecturer – Tal Becker
Week Six
Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Introduction, chapters1, 2, Conclusion
Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapters 5, 9-11, Conclusion
Week Seven
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chapters 2-5 (Lemkin)
From Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) [hereinafter Hoffman]
Chapter 1 “The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights: The Mid-Twentieth Century Disjuncture”
Chapter 2, “The ‘Human Rights Revolution’ at Work: Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe”
Chapter 3, ‘Legal Diplomacy – Law, Politics and the Genesis of Postwar European Human Rights’
Chapter 4, “Rene Cassin: Les droits de l’homme and the Universality of Human Rights,” 1945-1966
Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights”
Reading from Jacques Maritain, “The Individual and the Person,” Natural Law,” “Human Rights” “The Person and the Common Good”
Week Eight
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Dan Edelstein, “Enlightenment Rights Talk,” Journal of Modern History 86:3 (Sept. 2014), pp. 530-565
Week Nine
Michael Galchinsky, Dancing at Three Weddings: Jews and Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) [Galchinsky’s book surveys Jewish involvements in the human rights movement’s evolution, comparing and contrasting the Soviet Jewry movement with Jewish movements to protest genocides and analyzing the interactions and tensions between human rights, Jewish nationalism and domestic civil rights.
UNITTHREE : HUMAN RIGHTS IN MODERN JEWISH AND MUSLIM THOUGHT
Week Ten
Introduction from Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics
Milton R. Konvitz, “Man’s Dignity in God’s World,” (1971), in Idem,. Judaism and Human Rights (Norton, 1972)
Haim Cohn, Human Rights and Jewish Law (Ktav, 1984) (selections)
Robert Cover, “Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order,” Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 1 (1987): 65-74
Irving Greenberg, “Ðialectics of Power: Reflections in Light of the Holocaust”
Lenn E. Goodman, Judaism, Human Rights and Human Values (Oxford University Press, 1998), chapters 2 and 5
Yehuda Brandes, Judaism and Human Rights: The Dialectic between ‘The Image of God’ and ‘Holy Nation’ (Israel Democracy Institute, 2013) [Hebrew] selections in translation
Alan Mittleman, “Two or Three Concepts of Dignity,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2013
Abdulaziz Sachedina, “The Clash of Universalisms: Religious and Secular in Human Rights,” in Idem. Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (Oxford University press, 2009)
UNIT FOUR : GENEALOGY AND JUSTIFICATION
Week Eleven
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities” Daedalus , Winter, 2000, pp. 1-29
Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Georgetown University Press, 2013)., Intro, chapters 1-3, 6
Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Idolatry”
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (University of Notre Dame University Press, 2006) (selections)
UNIT FIVE: NEW DIRECTIONS AND CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS
Week Twelve – Classroom presentations on Suggested Topics
Goodhart, Chapter 8, ‘Political Democracy and State Repression,”
Chapter 9, “Global Civil Society and Human Rights,”
Chapter 13, “Human Rights and Forced Migration,”
Chapter 14, “Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights”
Chapter 17, “Humanitarian Intervention”
Chapter 19, “Transitional Justice”
Week Thirteen
Presentations and final readings from Lemkin, Hans Jonas, Vacav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi
Final Take-Home Exam
The Final will be a 2000 word, take-home essay analyzing and reflecting on the argument of Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Cornell University Press, 2013)
Camus – “Relative Utopia is the only realistic choice; it is our last frail hope of saving our skins”
(Neither Victim, etc. 1980 ed. P. 44)
1