By trade he is an environmental attorney and managing director of the 250-member Lowenstein Sandler law firm in Roseland. Now, Michael Rodburg has taken on another broad responsibility: He is the newly appointed chair of the American Conference on Diversity.

The organization that began in 1927 as the National Conference of Christians and Jews, then became the National Conference for Community and Justice-New Jersey in 2002, changed its name again earlier last year and spun itself off to become an autonomous state association.

To Rodburg, its mission of encouraging tolerance is one that blends naturally with the values he learned in his largely secular upbringing in Union as part of a working-class Jewish family.

“Union was a very German town. I saw anti-Semitism in school. There were fights after school. There was a lot of ugliness that in the ’50s people just didn’t talk about.

“There was a sense that we shouldn’t associate with black people,” he said. “But in my family, there was always a sense that this wasn’t right. My parents were big liberal Democrats. They were hard-working people who survived the Depression and the war. I grew up with that.”

Contemplating his two-year term from a conference room at his law firm, the North Caldwell resident said he intends to bring more prominence to a largely low-profile group that works diligently at overcoming obstacles of hate.

“At our core is our leadership institute, which brings together urban kids from inner-city high schools with their peers from suburban schools. It’s not one of those ‘Kumbaya’ things where they hold hands for a week. They learn how they can go back to their schools and be instruments of change and to recognize problems, even in the most lily-white schools,” he said. “We don’t just want kids to go home saying, ‘Before, I didn’t understand Asians, but now, some of my best friends are Asian.’”

According to Rodburg, one special area of sensitivity among adolescents is homophobia. “We see a lot of gay and lesbian issues,” he said. “How do we deal with them? I think it is a tougher issue than race at this point, because you’re not going to find much discussion in New Jersey that discrimination against black people is a good thing. You may believe it, but you’re not going to say it.

“The role we plan is as an honest broker. We are not there to advocate a position. We are there to make sure there is respect and that dialogue occurs with respect. Whatever religious issues may arise in regard to homosexuality, violence or name-calling or overt discrimination has no place in our schools.”

Operating with corporate sponsorships, another conference program provides diversity training in workplace environments on a fee-for-service basis. Sometimes, bridging cultural divides can be crucial. The conference can provide expertise in resolving issues of religious modesty, for instance, which can be especially sensitive, Rodburg said. “A Muslim woman dealing with a medical problem, for example, may have to be dealt with in ways that health professionals need to understand. Or if someone who needs to go on a low-salt diet comes from a culture with high sodium content in its food, you’re not going to be effective.”

Conceding that his organization currently is not well-known, Rodburg hopes to use its institutional voice as a “spokesperson to make our presence better felt. We would like to be called in by municipalities to mediate between groups.”

While organizations such as the NAACP or the Anti-Defamation League may focus primarily “on trying to protect a particular group, we are not perceived that way,” he said. “We are here to protect a pluralistic society.”

A drive “to make a difference” has been a key motivator since Rodburg was an economics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an antiwar activist who volunteered to campaign for Sen. Eugene McCarthy against President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 presidential election, “I discovered that being an economist was not going to make a difference.”

As a top student at Harvard Law School, he won an editorship at its law review and coauthored an article predicting the rise of health maintenance organizations some 10 years before HMOs became prominent components of the medical care industry.

Showing the same perspicacity after passing the NJ Bar exam and joining Lowenstein Sandler, he segued from corporate law into a practice area that was in its infancy when the first environmental regulations were passed in the 1970s.

Three years ago, one of his clients, supermarket entrepreneur and philanthropist Allen Bildner, invited the attorney to join the conference board and become part of a once-proud national organization that has lately fallen on tough times.

“Our history is wonderful,” said Rodburg. “We took part in anti-lynching campaigns and against the anti-Catholicism that occurred when Al Smith ran for president in 1928.”

But the National Conference of Christians and Jews “was perceived as a religious-based organization” whose NJ chapter “really didn’t exist and was too narrowly focused on Christian-Jewish relations.”

In recent years, after “some complications” within the national organization, “we in New Jersey did not like what we saw happening at the national level. They were not being responsive to affiliate representation. While we were raising money, we would get back a small percentage of what we raised and not a whole lot in services,” he said.

“We finally reached a breaking point. We had done a lot of good work, and national was becoming a distraction.” For nearly a year, the state association has been an independent body.

Although he wouldn’t specify the figures, Rodburg hopes to raise enough funds to double the conference’s annual budget for its eight chapters — including in Essex County, Central New Jersey, Princeton, and the Jersey shore.

He calls it a “modest goal” for what some may consider a quite lofty ambition.

“There ought to be more places where people of all kinds could get together and share our lives — just get to know each other,” he said. “Because when there are issues — and some of those issues are political and deeply intractable — maybe you can have a better dialogue and help resolve some of them.”