James Loeffler
Biographic Data
| ID | 3597312 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Loeffler |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Loeffler |
| SIGNATURE | LOEFFLER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5079-090X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Tradition in Crisis
2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration on Judaism and Human Rights, issued by a distinguished group of international jurists, rabbis, and scholars at the 1974 McGill International Colloquium on Judaism and Human Rights. This article traces the emergence of a specifically Jewish religious human rights tradition to that moment of political crisis in the globalized Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Out of Montreal came three different me…
The Right to Banality
The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several k…
The Religions of Human Rights
The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts …
Staging Hillula
The writer, Zohar scholar and Zionist activist Ariel Bension (1880–1932) has attracted attention of late from scholars seeking to recover an alternative vision of Zionism with Mizrahi roots in Ottoman Palestine. Yet the instrumentalization of Bension's biography for the politics of identity in present-day Israel has led to a flattening effect whereby Bension is divorced from his manifold ties to European and global Jewish culture. In this article…
When Hermann Cohen Cried
In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identifie…
The First Genocide
Three days in December
The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to a…
The ‘Lust Machine’
Rooted Cosmopolitans
“The Famous Trinity of 1917”
Becoming Cleopatra
The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliati…
Nationalism without a Nation
In this article, I launch a wholesale reexamination of the under-studied subject of American Jewish nationalism. With the focus on the road to Israeli statehood, scholars have ignored the complex, contradictory patterns of nationalist identification that marked American Zionist politics in the first half of the twentieth century. I explore this thesis through a re-reading of two key historical episodes: the American Jewish Congress movement of 19…
The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism
This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s g…
Gabriella Safran. Wandering Soul
Ruth HaCohen. The Music Libel against the Jews
One of the more welcome trends in cultural history over the past several years has been the sonic turn. After decades of treating music and orality with caution, historians have of late plunged into sound studies. This change has also had the salutary effect of emboldening musicologists to venture into the histories of emotions, listening, and the senses. Both trends are on display in Ruth HaCohen's remarkable book. In a tour de force that mixes …
In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children
This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Dmitrii Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony no. 13 {Babi Yar),I present an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representations of the Nazi genocide in a now forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 Piano Trio, "In …
Between Zionism and Liberalism
Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting…
Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music
Music is widely recognized as a central component of Israeli national identity, yet the putative Jewishness of Israeli music remains a subject of enduring cultural controversy and ideological confusion. I argue in this article that the roots of Israeli music's distinctive national character can be traced to the pre-World War I activities of Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn, the pioneering Zionist scholar and ideological progenitor of a revolutionary new con…
Between Zionism and Liberalism
Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting…
Nationalism without a Nation
In this article, I launch a wholesale reexamination of the under-studied subject of American Jewish nationalism. With the focus on the road to Israeli statehood, scholars have ignored the complex, contradictory patterns of nationalist identification that marked American Zionist politics in the first half of the twentieth century. I explore this thesis through a re-reading of two key historical episodes: the American Jewish Congress movement of 19…
Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music
Music is widely recognized as a central component of Israeli national identity, yet the putative Jewishness of Israeli music remains a subject of enduring cultural controversy and ideological confusion. I argue in this article that the roots of Israeli music's distinctive national character can be traced to the pre-World War I activities of Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn, the pioneering Zionist scholar and ideological progenitor of a revolutionary new con…
When Hermann Cohen Cried
In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identifie…
Three days in December
The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to a…
Becoming Cleopatra
The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliati…
The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism
This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s g…
In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children
This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Dmitrii Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony no. 13 {Babi Yar),I present an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representations of the Nazi genocide in a now forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 Piano Trio, "In …
Between Zionism and Liberalism
Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting…
Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music
Music is widely recognized as a central component of Israeli national identity, yet the putative Jewishness of Israeli music remains a subject of enduring cultural controversy and ideological confusion. I argue in this article that the roots of Israeli music's distinctive national character can be traced to the pre-World War I activities of Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn, the pioneering Zionist scholar and ideological progenitor of a revolutionary new con…
The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism
This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s g…
Gabriella Safran. Wandering Soul
Ruth HaCohen. The Music Libel against the Jews
One of the more welcome trends in cultural history over the past several years has been the sonic turn. After decades of treating music and orality with caution, historians have of late plunged into sound studies. This change has also had the salutary effect of emboldening musicologists to venture into the histories of emotions, listening, and the senses. Both trends are on display in Ruth HaCohen's remarkable book. In a tour de force that mixes …
In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children
This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Dmitrii Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony no. 13 {Babi Yar),I present an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representations of the Nazi genocide in a now forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 Piano Trio, "In …
Nationalism without a Nation
In this article, I launch a wholesale reexamination of the under-studied subject of American Jewish nationalism. With the focus on the road to Israeli statehood, scholars have ignored the complex, contradictory patterns of nationalist identification that marked American Zionist politics in the first half of the twentieth century. I explore this thesis through a re-reading of two key historical episodes: the American Jewish Congress movement of 19…
“The Famous Trinity of 1917”
Becoming Cleopatra
The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliati…
Rooted Cosmopolitans
The ‘Lust Machine’
Three days in December
The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to a…
The First Genocide
The Religions of Human Rights
The modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts …
Staging Hillula
The writer, Zohar scholar and Zionist activist Ariel Bension (1880–1932) has attracted attention of late from scholars seeking to recover an alternative vision of Zionism with Mizrahi roots in Ottoman Palestine. Yet the instrumentalization of Bension's biography for the politics of identity in present-day Israel has led to a flattening effect whereby Bension is divorced from his manifold ties to European and global Jewish culture. In this article…
When Hermann Cohen Cried
In this article, I examine a curious chapter in the history of modern Jewish culture: the 1914 Berlin meeting of Zionist musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn with the philosopher Hermann Cohen. A shared belief in the redemptive power of aesthetics and the unique character of Jewish music briefly drew the two men together. Each saw in sound an unparalleled means by which to recalibrate Jewish difference in relation to Western civilization. Each identifie…
Tradition in Crisis
2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration on Judaism and Human Rights, issued by a distinguished group of international jurists, rabbis, and scholars at the 1974 McGill International Colloquium on Judaism and Human Rights. This article traces the emergence of a specifically Jewish religious human rights tradition to that moment of political crisis in the globalized Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Out of Montreal came three different me…
The Right to Banality
The global political order that emerged from 1919 inscribed Jews into two distinct legal roles under the League of Nations system: a model national minority in the new nation-states of Eastern Europe, and a virtual national majority in British Mandatory Palestine. Despite extensive scholarship on each of these stories, we know precious little about how they interacted in the interwar Jewish political imagination. In this article I track several k…
Political science (15 works) · History (14 works) · Judaism (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Literature (8 works)