Constitutionalism, Human Rights, and the Genealogy of Jewish American Liberalism

Samuel Moyn has written a brilliantly detailed yet wide-ranging essay about Louis Henkin’s “drastic self-reinvention” as “the leading American legal advocate of human rights.” What light, asks Moyn, does Henkin’s Jewishness shed on his emergence as “the premier [American] contributor” to the international human rights movement? What did Judaism or Jewishness have to do with it? And what does that, in turn, tell us about the shape and arc of American Jewish politics and identities and their relationship to human rights advocacy in the twentieth century? Moyn’s essay has three main threads. First is Henkin’s late-blooming career as the United States’ preeminent, “iconic” human rights lawyer. Henkin was fifty before he wrote anything on the subject of human rights; and well over fifty before his sudden conversion to the view that fostering international human rights law was a promising avenue for human betterment, and international human rights advocacy an exhilarating, high-powered calling. The conversion happened in the midto late-1970s, and this makes Henkin’s career a study in the Moyn thesis about the sudden, unpredictable, contingent, and conjunctural take-off of the human rights