Healing the World

Do Jews have a particular responsibility to enact Tikkun olam, healing the world? In this session, Dr Noreena Hertz, leading anti-globalisation advocate, and Justice Albie Sachs, a leader in the struggle against apartheid, discussed the decisions that have led to lives lived on the frontline of the struggle for justice and human rights, and explored to what extent their Jewish identity has influenced them in their activism.

Dr Noreena Hertz is the Associate Director of the Centre for International Business at Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow at the LSE. She is the author of The Silent Takeover (2002).

Albie Sachs, lawyer and author, was a prominent member of the ANC. Jailed for his activities, he spent several years in exile in Britain and in Mozambique, where he was the victim of a car bombing in which he lost an arm. His book The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter describes the car bombing. Justice Sachs sits on the South African Constitutional Court. His book The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs was dramatised for the RSC and broadcast by the BBC.

Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet is Principal of Leo Baeck College Centre for Jewish Education. He has been involved in inter-faith work for many years and is the author of numerous books and articles. His latest book, Talking to the Other, was launched at Jewish Book Week 2003.

"If Jews have earned the right, and always have the right really, to be as good and as bad as everybody else in the world, then we are not a chosen people and we have to bear the consequences, and we must be as criticised and willing to accept criticism for misconduct in the same way as everybody else. No excuses. No special responsibilities." [Albie Sachs]

"Each of us in this room has a choice as to the extent to which we individually and collectively try to make this a better world: letaken olam. And we as Jews, as people who have experienced victimisation, exclusion and the suppression of our rights, perhaps more than any other group, have more than any other group an even greater imperative and an even greater ability to act." [Noreena Hertz]