Kenneth Roth

Kenneth Roth (born September 23, 1955) is an American attorney, human rights activist, and writer.

Kenneth Roth was born on September 23, 1955, in Elmhurst, Illinois, to Muriel T. Roth and Walter S. Roth.

His father was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany.

Walter's family had a butchery in Germany near Frankfurt when Adolf Hitler came to power.

Kenneth Roth grew up in Deerfield, Illinois.

He graduated from Brown University in 1977 with a BA in history and received his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1980.

As a result, as he worked as a lawyer, and volunteered nights and weekends doing human rights work, focusing on the Soviet imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.

Roth joined Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1987 as deputy director.

His initial work centered on Haiti and gradually extended to Cuba and the Middle East, among other places.

He was the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 1993 to 2022.

Since 1993 (when Aryeh Neier left to become head of George Soros's Open Society Institute), Roth became the executive director of HRW.

While he was in the office, the HRW staff increased from 60 to 552; HRW shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for banning of anti-personnel mines, helped to establish International Criminal Court and ban children in the military.

Roth resigned from HRW on 31 August 2022.

After leaving HRW, Roth said he intended to write a book.

Roth received honorary degrees from Brown University, Bowdoin College, the University of Ottawa, and the American University of Paris.

He was a recipient of the Athens Democracy Award, the William Rogers Award from Brown University and the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University.

He serves on the Watson Institute Board of Overseers at Brown University, the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin, and the Humanitarian and Development Advisory Panel of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Following a 2006 HRW report on the 2006 Lebanon war, Roth wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun in which he criticized the Israeli response to Hezbollah's rocket attacks on northern Israeli towns by quoting the Old Testament: "An eye for an eye—or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye—may have been the morality of some more primitive moment."

In reaction, the Anti-Defamation League accused him of using a "classic anti-Semitic stereotype against Jews".

A following editorial in The New York Sun decried the statement: "To suggest that Judaism is a primitive religion incompatible with contemporary morality is to engage in supersessionism, the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much antisemitism".

Georgetown law professor and columnist Rosa Brooks called this criticism of Roth an example of reflexive labeling of criticism of Israel as antisemitism, and said that anyone accusing Roth of antisemitism must be "insane".

On June 13, 2011, Roth was married in an Anglican church to Annie Sparrow.

Roth worked in private practice as a litigator and served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the United States Department of Justice for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington DC.

Roth's career in human rights began inauspiciously.

The one human rights course offered at Yale Law School was repeatedly canceled, and upon graduation he found that jobs in the field were few.

HRW founder Robert Bernstein said to The Jerusalem Post in April 2011 that in relation to the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which issued the Goldstone Report, Roth "seeks to minimize the importance of Judge Goldstone's stunning retraction of his war crime accusations against Israel."

Bernstein said of Roth, "it is time for him to follow Judge Goldstone's example and issue his own mea culpa."

On 14 April 2011, the U.N report's three other co-authors released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's partial recantation.

In 2014, Roth tweeted, "Germans rally against anti-Semitism that flared in Europe in response to Israel's conduct in Gaza war. Merkel joins."

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic criticized Roth, saying Roth "blame[d] the Jewish state for the violent acts of anti-Semites" and that "it is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice are not the cause of prejudice."

Raphael Magarik disagreed with Goldberg in an opinion for The Forward, writing "denying that Israel’s behavior has any causal role in anti-Semitism is deeply counter-intuitive."

Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute called for Roth to step down stating that he "appears increasingly intent to subordinate the organization he leads to a much more limited and subjective political agenda."

Roth also tweeted a controversial advertisement equating the war with "Nazi genocide" followed by the Holocaust tagline "Never again".

United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Deborah Lipstadt called this language "soft-core denigration of the Holocaust".

In April 2015, Steven A. Cook, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, criticized Roth for his tweets critical of Israel, which sent humanitarian aid to Nepal during the April 2015 Nepal earthquake.

Roth tweeted, "Easier to address a far-away humanitarian disaster than the nearby one of Israel's making in Gaza. End the blockade!"

In a 2017 opinion for The Forward, Daniel Kohn claimed that Roth had established a Middle East/North Africa (MENA) team composed of what he termed anti-Israel activists.

In 2020, the Algemeiner Journal wrote, "Roth has long been noted for his hatred of Israel and his use of antisemitic rhetoric to attack it."

In 2021, Roth tweeted: "Antisemitism is always wrong, and it long preceded the creation of Israel, but the surge in UK antisemitic incidents during the recent Gaza conflict gives the lie to those who pretend that the Israeli government's conduct doesn't affect antisemitism."

American Jewish Committee director David Harris responded: "No, antisemitism is always wrong, period. Just as racism is always wrong, period. Coming from an alleged human rights defender, totally & utterly despicable".