President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Gildersleeve to the U.S. delegation to write the United Nations Charter. She was the only woman named to the delegation. The delegates were instructed to address two issues: 1) the need to prevent future wars through the creation of a Security Council; and 2) the need to enhance human welfare, which they accomplished through the establishment of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Gildersleeve sought and received drafting responsibility for the work of this second council—the one, as she put it, in charge of "doing things rather than preventing things from being done." She was able to insert into the charter the following goals for people around the world: "higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development." She also persuaded the delegates to adopt the following aim for the United Nations: "universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion." She insisted for the charter to require the appointment of the Commission on Human Rights, which under the direction of Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later. Having been invited by General Douglas MacArthur, in March 1946, Gildersleeve served as a member of the U.S. Educational Mission to Japan. She was respected in Japan for having been the only American woman delegate at the San Francisco founding conference. Some historians consider Gildersleeve to have been "the most influential leader" of the Christian "anti-Zionist lobby" of her era. Gildersleeve wrote that "after (her) retirement from the Deanship at Barnard, (she) devoted (her)self mainly to the Middle East", describing herself as "struggling ardently against" the creation of and, later, the continued existence of the Jewish State. She blamed her failure to prevent the creation of the State of Israel on "the Zionist control of the media of communication." Gildersleeve repeatedly testified before congressional committees and lobbied members of Congress and President Harry Truman to deny American political, military, and financial support to Israel. Gildersleeve was a trustee of the American University of Beirut and a leading figure in the Christian opposition to Israel's statehood in 1948. She helped found and chaired the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, which merged into the American Friends of the Middle East. According to the historian Robert Moats Miller of the University of North