Henry Schwarzschild

Henry Schwarzschild (November 2, 1925 – June 1, 1996) was an activist for civil rights and human rights. He joined the Civil Rights Movement and became involved in the fight against capital punishment. He founded the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), served as the executive director of the Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee from 1964 to 1970, to 1990.

Early life Schwarzschild was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. At 13, he moved to New York City in 1939 After serving in the army, it is said that he had the "appearance of a durable veteran from ancient wars, penetrating eyes intolerant of bombast and passivity, facial lines that mobilize easily to express by turns infectious good humor, remembered pain, resignation, impatience."

He married Kathleen Jett, and the couple had two daughters, Miriam and Hannah. In the 1950s, he worked as an executive of the International Rescue Committee, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Once he was released, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote on his imprisonment forms, "your courageous willingness to go to jail for freedom has brought us closer to our nation's bright tomorrow." In the first year, he convinced 300 lawyers to take their vacation time and go down to the South to help with the cause of black civil rights. Afterward, it finally began to get both funding and more volunteers into the program. He also worked to create the National Coalition for Universal and Unconditional Amnesty to pressure Gerald Ford to pardon those who had left the United States to avoid conscription. They created public policy campaigns and served as a resource for activists working to create change on a state by state basis.

Opposition to Israel Following the summer siege of Beirut in the 1982 Lebanon War by Israel, he wrote a public letter of resignation from the editorial advisory board of the journal Sh'ma:

I will not avoid an unambiguous response to the Israeli army's turning West Beirut into another Warsaw Ghetto. I now conclude and avow that the price of a Jewish state is, to me, Jewishly unacceptable and that the existence of this (or any similar) Jewish ethnic religious nation state is a Jewish, i.e. a human and moral, disaster and violates every remaining value for which Judaism and Jews might exist in history. The lethal military triumphalism and corrosive racism that inheres in the State and in its supporters (both there and here) are profoundly abhorrent to me. So is the message that now goes forth to the nations of the world that the Jewish people claim the right to impose a holocaust on others in order to preserve the State. I now renounce the State of Israel, disavow any political connection or emotional obligation to it, and declare myself its enemy.

In 2003, the letter was included in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.

In 1988, Schwarzschild testified before the Congressional Black Caucus as a member of the executive board of the Jewish Committee on the Middle East, saying, in part:

I and an increasing number of other American Jews are appalled at the spectacle of the State of Israel, which thinks of itself today as the contemporary incarnation of the Jewish people, having made another people into a dispersed nation; denying them national identity and self-determination; depriving them of their lands and water; suppressing their national, social, and cultural institutions; beating their children; killing unarmed civilians; exiling their leaders; imprisoning their spokespeople; destroying their homes; opening and closing the Occupied Territories as though they were the Jewish ghettos of the European Middle Ages ...

In these and other statements, Schwarzschild characterized the treatment of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel as inconsistent with, and at times directly in opposition to, Jewish tradition and values.

In 2003, an Orthodox Jewish American newspaper, The Jewish Press, created an annual "Henry Schwarzschild Award" for "a person in the public spotlight who, by his or her statements, displays contempt for the Jewish people, disregard for historical truth, a desire to sup at the table of Israel's enemies, or who otherwise plays into the hands of the enemies of Jews and Israel."

Other activities He stated that he "could not live in a period of major moral, social events and be a bystander." The annual Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture began in 1999, sponsored by the NYCLU and the Hogarth Center for Social Action at Manhattan College. The lecturers focus on critical issues of "human rights and human dignity."