Aryeh Neier

With a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by Nadine StrossenA new edition of the most important free speech book of the past half-century, with a new chapter by the author on some of the top First Amendment controversies of today “If Aryeh Neier had done nothing else in his absolutely towering human rights, civil liberties career other than write Defending My Enemy, that still would have made him a hero and a giant.” —Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties Union When Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors—Aryeh Neier, then the national director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor, came to the Nazis’ defense. Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy. Nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic of free speech in a volume that includes his original essay along with a new chapter addressing present-day First Amendment battles, including the Charlottesville march, book bans, the heckler’s veto, attacks on free speech on college campuses, and the threat to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan. Including a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by longtime free speech champion Nadine Strossen, Defending My Enemy offers razor-sharp analysis from the man Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute describes as “an icon of justice and fearlessness.”

A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its foundersDuring the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in struggles against totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive, authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives an insider’s perspective on the movement’s goals, the disputes about its mission, its rise to international importance, and the challenges to come. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author.

Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz--an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala--tells the story of the village of Santa Maria Tzeja, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village--its birth, destruction, and rebirth--embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa Maria Tzeja, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa Maria Tzeja, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.

Since joining the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1963 and becoming its youngest executive director, Aryeh Neier has been at the forefront of efforts to fight for civil liberties, human rights, and social justice. Whether he was confronting police abuse, defending draft opponents or defending free speech, as he did at the ACLU out-maneuvering the Reagan administration over military abuses in El Salvador, promoting accountability for political crimes in Argentina and Chile or supporting dissidents in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as he did at Human Rights Watch or trying to eradicate landmines, promote stability in the Balkans or establish an International Criminal Court, as he has at the Open Society Institute Aryeh Neier has been methodical, relentless, and unusually successful. In this look back at an amazing career, Neier both reflects on the unintended consequences of some of his victories and why, if he had anticipated them, he might have done things differently and reveals that some of the various movements of which he was a part had their greatest triumphs under the most adverse circumstances.