James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as the Ida and Nathan Kolodiz Director of the Jewish Studies Program. He writes widely on modern Jewish history from antisemitism to Zionism, with a focus on the overlooked ties between the Jewish past and the global present in politics, law, and culture.
Rooted Cosmopolitans
Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century offers the first major account of this story, told through the lives of five remarkable Jewish activists who built both the State of Israel and the architecture of modern human rights. The result is a multiple award-winning book that challenges assumptions about the Holocaust origins of modern human rights and speaks directly to the urgent political debates of the present.
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