(RNS) — The death of Bob Moses on Sunday (July 25) at age 86 should make anyone who dares meddle with Americans’ voting rights in this country pause. The life of the great educator and civil rights leader in Mississippi during the turbulent and violent 1960s reminds us that there may be no more noble cause and that it attracts powerful champions.


I met the 29-year-old Moses at the Morning Star Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in February 1964, when I was a young rabbi serving Congregation B’Nai Jehudah in Kansas City, Missouri. Like millions of Americans, I had been deeply moved months before by the huge civil rights rally that drew hundreds of thousands of people to the Lincoln Memorial.
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In February 1964, the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City sent me to Hattiesburg as its official representative to participate in the interreligious Ministers’ Project, which included rabbis, Presbyterian pastors and Episcopal priests from all over the country. I spent a week in Mississippi supporting the town’s African Americans, who were cynically forced to take a detailed and lengthy test that only a constitutional scholar could pass, designed to systematically deprive them of their vote.

In 2010, during Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s tense Senate confirmation hearing, Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who supported her nomination, jokingly asked President Barack Obama’s nominee what she did on Christmas Day.  It was a strange, even bizarre question because it had nothing to do with her judicial qualifications. But Kagan’s humorous reply completely disarmed her Senatorial opponents: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” But there is much more to the Jewish-Chinese connection than choosing food from column A or column B on a menu on December 25th.

In his fascinating book, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China (Penguin), Jonathan Kaufman tells the little-known history of how two remarkable Sephardic families became major economic and political forces in China.  
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Originally from Baghdad, the Sassoons and the Kadoories established rival commercial empires during the 19th and 20th centuries in Shanghai and Hong Kong. For more than 175 years, these families profited greatly in shipping, commodities, textiles, real estate, and selling recreational and medicinal opium to the Chinese.

On April 21, 1991, my wife Marcia and I were among the 150 guests President George H. W. Bush invited to the formal dedication service of the newly constructed Interfaith Chapel at Camp David, the presidential retreat.

Two years earlier, I was the only Jewish member of a 15-person committee charged with raising funds to build the chapel and determine its design.

The debate that ensued over the proposed images on the chapel’s 8 stained-glass windows brought to the surface the tension between those who see America as a Christian nation and those who, like me, believe that the Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and conscience for all its citizens.

Despite the chapel’s official interfaith name and announced purpose, some members insisted that our mission was to create a Christian church.
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What I call “The Battle of Camp David” began when the highly skilled, deeply religious Christian émigré artist, Rudolph Sandon, and his wife, Helen, laid out the initial sketches of their window designs. Six of the 8 contained the denominational logos of major Protestant bodies, including the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal Church. The seventh featured a Christian cross representing Roman Catholicism, and the eighth combined symbols of Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.