Take hate-crime legislation. Abortion rights. Religious liberty. Separation of church and state.

Michael Lieberman is a believer.

As the long time Washington counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, he defines, defends and declaims the ADL mission with passion and persistence.

He was in Denver this week to boost ADL leadership programs and to meet with top brass at the Air Force Academy, where the ADL has worked extensively over the past several years to free it of religious coercion.

Lieberman’s Washington office of ADL focuses on international and domestic issues. His bailiwick is mostly the domestic side: civil rights.

SOMETIMES life comes in halves. It took half my life to notice, compile, save — and remember I saved — these examples.

When Groucho Marx was told that a country club he applied to denied membership to Jews, he asked: “Since I’m half Jewish, can I go into the swimming pool up to my knees?”

Marketing experts know that if you do nothing, nothing happens. But what to do is sometimes a guess. As one advertising guru said: “One half of my advertising dollars are wasted — but I don’t know which half.”

A 13-year-old, not lacking in self-confidence, sought entrance to the famed Volozhin yeshiva, telling its venerable head, “I can answer any question in half of the Talmud [over 2,700 folio pages].”