ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jewish NGO spokesmen challenged prevailing orthodoxies and drew on the specific memory of a legal challenge to Nazi Germany, the 1933 Bernheim Petition, to argue for allowing individuals the right to petition the UN. It focuses on human rights activism in the larger context of an emergent literature on Jewish internationalism that traces Jewish commitment to constructing a stable international order. The chapter diversifies the usual set of actors and illustrates a fundamental entwinement between Jewish historical experience and a strong variant of international human rights discourse. Bernheim was a German Jew who had been discharged from his job in Upper Silesia after Nazi Germany began its exclusion of Jews from public life by passing legislation that prevented Jews from holding civil service jobs and practising a variety of other professions.
