ABSTRACT
From the moment it was founded in 1892, the American Yiddish socialist monthly Di tsukunft sought to represent the vanguard of intellectual activity among Yiddish-speaking Jews in New York and, eventually, the world. Most current discussions of human rights use as a model the definition and list of rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948. Two circumstances are worth pointing out. First, within this period, Di tsukunft came to human rights rather late, addressing the issue primarily in 1913 and after. Second, it passed certain issues over in silence. Discussions of Negro rights in Di tsukunft focused primarily on civil rights, not human rights in the modern, international sense. In 1889, the United States Senate had formed a Committee on Immigration. The human rights issue about which Di tsukunft's contributors had the most to say that was not a boundary issue was women's rights.
