Education Day: How the Lubavitcher Rebbe Brought the Seven Noahide Laws into American Civic Life (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798198506947)

In 1978, by Joint Resolution of Congress and Presidential proclamation, the United States observed for the first time what was called Education Day, U.S.A. The date was the eleventh of Nisan, the Hebrew birthday of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Every American President since Carter has issued the proclamation on that date. The continuity is unbroken across eight administrations, forty-seven years, and every conceivable shift in American politics.

How did this happen?

Education Day is the first sustained documentary examination of the civic work of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, across the American polity and the Israeli polity. Drawing on Presidential proclamations, Joint Resolutions of Congress, state legislation, and the substantive correspondence the Rebbe conducted with four American Presidents, the book traces how a Hasidic rebbe in Brooklyn built a model for religious leadership in a pluralistic society that has had no precedent in American history.

The book examines:

• The Seven Noahide Laws and their entry into Presidential proclamation language in 1982 and federal legislative text in 1991
• The 1978 Education Day address and the argument for character as the goal of education
• The Moment of Silence campaign and its forty-year arc from the Rebbe's early advocacy to the Kentucky statute of 2025
• The Reagan correspondence, including the 1987 letter and its "clarion call vital to all mankind" formulation
• The 1991 Joint Resolution placing the Noahide framework into federal legislative text
• The 1987 audience with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the needs of the Chinese community of New York
• The 1959 correspondence with David Ben-Gurion on religious education in the Jewish state
• The posthumous continuation of the work across every administration since the Rebbe's passing in 1994

For readers of Jonathan Sacks's The Dignity of Difference and Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief. For students of religion in public life. For anyone interested in how religious commitment can engage civic institutions in a pluralistic society without compromising either the religion or the institutions.

The Rebbe's work has produced one of the most documented and least understood records of religious-civic engagement in twentieth-century America. This book begins the work of understanding it.