Contemporary Authors

• A Gilgul Fun a Nigun: Jewish Musicians in New York, 1881-1945 Harvard College Library (Cambridge, MA), 1997
• The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2010
• Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2018

1. Rooted cosmopolitans : Jews and human rights in the twentieth century LCCN 2017964065 Type of material Book Personal name Loeffler, James Benjamin, author. Main title Rooted cosmopolitans : Jews and human rights in the twentieth century / James Loeffler. Published/Produced New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1805 Description pages cm ISBN 9780300217247 (hardcover : alk. paper) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The most musical nation : Jews and culture in the late Russian empire LCCN 2009046398 Type of material Book Personal name Loeffler, James Benjamin. Main title The most musical nation : Jews and culture in the late Russian empire / James Loeffler. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c2010. Description xi, 274 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780300137132 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0300137133 (hardcover : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER ML3776 .L64 2010 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Performing Arts Reading Rm (Madison, LM113) - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER ML3776 .L64 2010 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113) 3. A gilgul fun a nigun : Jewish musicians in New York, 1881-1945 LCCN 99476630 Type of material Book Personal name Loeffler, James Benjamin. Main title A gilgul fun a nigun : Jewish musicians in New York, 1881-1945 / by James Benjamin Loeffler. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard College Library, 1997. Description 63 p. ; 28 cm. CALL NUMBER ML3528.8 .L64 1997 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• American Library Association Website - http://www.ala.org/awardsgrants/most-musical-nation-jews-and-culture-late-russian-empire

  The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire.

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  Outstanding Academic Titles
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  Monday, December 30, 2013 - 11:33
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  The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire.
  Winner Description:
  Loeffler, James. Yale, 2010.
  Title of a book, article or other published item (this will display to the public):
  The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire.
  ISBN of the winning item:
  9780300137132
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  Book
  Winner Detail Create Date:
  Monday, December 30, 2013 - 11:33
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  HUMANITIES
  Award Winner Subcategory (start typing):
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• James Loeffler Website - https://www.jamesloeffler.com/

  QUOTE:
  the Jewish role in building and critiquing the modern human rights movement after World War II, focusing on American, European, and Israeli Jewish political activity in international legal circles and at the United Nations over the period from the 1930s to the 1980s.
  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia.

  He writes widely on modern Jewish history from Zionism and the Holocaust to Jewish music, American Jewish identity, and Yiddish culture. His first book, The Most Musical Nation. Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2010), won eight major awards and honors. His second book, Rooted Cosmopolitans. Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century was published in May 2018 by Yale University Press. He is currently completing The Law of Strangers, an edited volume of articles about Jewish lawyers and international law. His writings on contemporary Jewish affairs have also appeared in the New York Times, Tablet, Mosaic, The New Republic, and Slate.

  Biography

  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia.
  ​
  A graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities, he pursued postgraduate studies in Israel at the Pardes Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He went on to serve as Sound Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. His scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the Dorot Foundation, the Wexner Foundation, the Fulbright Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. He has served as Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, and Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, won eight major awards and honors, including from the Association for Jewish Studies, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the ASCAP foundation. His other writings include essays on East European Jewish history, the antisemitism of Richard Wagner and Frederic Chopin, the history of klezmer music, American Jewish politics, the origins of Israeli popular song, the memory of the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish culture, and the history of international law. His writings have appeared in Tablet, Mosaic, Haaretz, The New Republic, Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Social Studies, Hedgehog Review, Time Magazine, and Slate.
  ​
  A trained pianist and musicologist, he has consulted to National Public Radio, the Center for Jewish History, Carnegie Hall, and numerous other cultural institutions. For ten years he served as scholar-in-residence for the Pro Musica Hebraica concert series at the Kennedy Center. Before that he directed the Former Soviet Jewish Community Cultural Initiative at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York City and worked at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also contributed the liner notes to the Grammy-nominated album The Zemiros Project (Traditional Crossroads, 2000).
  ​
  At the University of Virginia, he teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history, and modern European and International history. In 2009 he was awarded the college's Mead Distinguished Faculty Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching.
  ​
  He lives in Washington, DC.

• Israel Institute Website - https://israelinstitute.org/recipients/james-loeffler-phd

  James Loeffler, Ph.D.
  2015-2016 Research Grant Recipient
  Research Topic: Eastern European Jewish history; Jewish music

  James Loeffler’s work broadly looks at the intersection of Jewish culture, politics, and identity in modern Eastern Europe, Israel, and the United States. He is writing a critical and contextual evaluation of the biography and musical output of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and in the process exploring the under-studied subject of music in Israeli Society.
  Israel Institute Awards:
  Research Grants
  University of Virginia

• Wilson Center Website - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/james-loeffler

  History and Public Policy Program
  Guest Speaker
  James Loeffler
  Expertise
  History
  Affiliation
  Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia
  Bio
  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. In the spring of 2015 he is serving as Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received his AB from Harvard and his MA and PhD from Columbia University. A specialist in Jewish and European history, and the history of human rights, his publications include The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (2010) and “The Conscience of America”: Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American Foreign Policy at the 1945 United Nations San Francisco Conference,” Journal of American History (2013).

• Jewish Book Council - https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/30-days-30-authors-james-loeffler/

  The ProsenPeople

  30 Days, 30 Authors: James Loeffler
  Tuesday, December 05, 2017| Permalink
  Celebrate Jewish Book Month with #30days30authors! JBC invited an author to share thoughts on #JewLit for each day of Jewish Book Month. Watch, read, enjoy, and discover!

  This week, we are featuring the finalists and winner of the Natan Book Award at Jewish Book Council.

  Today, James Loeffler, the author of the forthcoming book Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, writes about his discovery of "The Third Roth."

  It was sometime in my first year of college when I discovered I had never heard of the greatest Jewish writer of the twentieth century. Or so I learned one day from a precocious friend with a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Have you read Joseph Roth? They say he’s the greatest Jewish writer of the century. You must mean Philip Roth? I responded. No, Joseph Roth. I paused, flummoxed. Then I tried again. Oh, you mean Henry Roth, the modernist immigrant bard, author of Call It Sleep? No, Joseph Roth. He’s Central European. The phrase conjured up Kafka. But I still drew a blank. Intrigued, I headed for the library to find out what was so special about this unknown Roth.
  From the first pages of Joseph Roth’s magisterial 1932 novel Radetzsky March, I was hooked. Here was an author nothing like the other Roths or even Kafka. He didn’t play with language or stylize reality. Instead, he peered directly into the terrors of history, even as he sweetly eulogized his beloved Habsburg Empire and its anguished, expectant Galician Jews. In place of the two dominant images of Jewish Eastern Europe—shtetl sentimentalism and pre-Holocaust shadows—he offered a different Old World: majestic and cruel, violent and graceful. For many modern Jewish writers, irony was an escape from a harsh world. For Roth, it was a scalpel to cut still more deeply into the flabby tissue of the present.
  What he exposed in those surgeries shocked me. I still recall my astonishment at seeing Roth mention Hitler by name in his first novel – from 1923! Already he sensed Europe was lurching towards an abyss, the Nazis were a dangerous new kind of political evil, and the Jews were the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The same held true for his poignant non-fiction. In his brilliant 1927 collection, Wandering Jews, he recognized in the uprooting of East European Jews after World War I a new kind of human category: the refugee. He went on to point out in his early 1930s writings that Jews were destined to suffer not only because of Nazi antisemitism or Western indifference but because of Europe’s own crisis. “Let me say it loud and clear,” he wrote in 1933 in “The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind,” his essay on Nazi book-burning, “The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination.”
  European Jews, however, did not suffer for lack of imagination. In my forthcoming book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, I show how hard international Jewish lawyers fought in the 1920s and 1930s to create new kinds of law to protect minority groups from precisely the kind of rising terror of the times. In a sense, modern human rights began with these forgotten efforts. Yet these early human rights activists found themselves stymied by European politics at the newly created League of Nations.
  I took the title of my third chapter, “Golden Shackles,” from a passage in Roth’s Wandering Jews. There he writes already in the 1920s of how the League of Nations is powerless to help the Jews of Europe. In spite of fancy titles and new laws, the League is hamstrung by the “golden shackles that its best-intentioned commissioners wear,” unable to issue basic papers to protect imperiled Jews. The same geopolitical forces that gave rise to the League held it hostage at the moment when it was needed most. “Animal welfare groups enjoy more popularity in every country, and with every level of the people, than does the League of Nations,” he adds bitterly.
  “Golden Shackles” nicely sums up the fate of Jewish human rights activists before World War II. Much like the bureaucrats in Geneva, the Jewish rights-defenders found themselves hand-cuffed, in their case by the shiny bonds of British imperial politics. The one European power strong enough to stop anti-Jewish persecution in Europe and support the interwar Jewish human rights vision viewed Jews as a political liability because of the Arab-Jewish conflict in British Mandatory Palestine.
  It is often said that Jews were the last true Austrians. Long after every other Habsburg citizen had become only a German, a Czech, a Pole or a Ukrainian, Jews like Joseph Roth held onto a broader liberal ideal of an Austria united in its diversity. But more than a nostalgia for a lost Austria, Joseph Roth also reminds us that Jews like him were arguably also the last Europeans. In fighting for international protection at the League of Nations, these Jews were the few remaining foot-soldiers who had yet to abandon “the noble ranks of the European army.”
  Today, as we struggle to understand a new world of Middle Eastern refugees, rising antisemitism, and an unceasing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it makes sense to re-read Henry Roth on the traumatic American Jewish experience of immigration and Phillip Roth on the complex American Jewish relationship to Zionism. But we should also not neglect Joseph Roth. His sober commentaries remind us that the story of modern human rights, too, has a Jewish past whose beginnings can be found in interwar Europe.

• Amazon -

  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Educated at Harvard, Columbia, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he also studied in Russia and Ukraine as a U.S. Fulbright Fellow. His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, won eight awards and honors, including from the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Sami Rohr Jewish Book Prize, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He is the recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Mellon Foundation New Directions Program.

  He is also the editor of The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jews and International Law (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), with Moria Paz.

  For over ten years he served as academic consultant and artistic curator to the Pro Musica Hebraica Foundation in its Jewish music series based at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He lives in Washington, DC with his family.

  More information is available at www.jamesloeffler.com

• Jewish Music Research Center Website - http://www.jewish-music.huji.ac.il/content/james-loeffler

  Researcher
  Ph.D. Columbia University, (2006), Dissertation: "The Most Musical Nation: Jews, Culture and Nationalism in the Late Russian Empire"; M.A. Columbia University (2000); B.A. Harvard University (1996); Founding Director, Vice-academic co-chair, Jewish Music Forum of the American Society for Jewish Music (New York); Research Director, Pro Musica Hebraica (Washington, DC).
  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in International Law and Dean’s Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law School. At UVA he teaches courses in Jewish and European history, legal history, and the history of human rights.
  His most recent publications include two books: Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2018), and a co-edited volume, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyering and International Law in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010), won eight awards and honors. Currents works in progress include a new biography of Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and the forgotten political origins of the genocide convention, a co-authored study of early twentieth-century musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn and the birth of cultural Zionism; and an edited collection of essays on new historiography of Zionism.
  His other research interests include international legal history, American Jewish politics, the past and present of Zionism, contemporary Jewish culture and its East European roots, and the history and future of Jewish music. For ten years he served as scholar-in-residence at Pro Musica Hebraica in Washington, DC, where he curated historically-informed concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has also served as a consultant to the Center for Jewish History, Carnegie Hall, National Public Radio, and the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, among other institutions.
  Email:
  james.loeffler@virginia.edu

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website - https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/james-loeffler

  James Loeffler is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia. He is a trained pianist, musicologist, and specialist on Jewish classical music. He serves as scholar-in-residence at Pro Musica Hebraica in Washington, DC, and has curated concerts at the Kennedy Center.

  Transcript
  JAMES LOEFFLER
  It’s always very striking to me that people will focus a lot of attention on a narrow set of questions about how much Wagner influenced Hitler. But in reality, Wagner’s shadow is much broader and darker in a way, because it filters into how generations of music critics and musicians treat Jews as they flock into the world of classical music.
  ALEISA FISHMAN
  James Loeffler is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia. He is a trained pianist, musicologist, and specialist on Jewish classical music. He serves as scholar-in-residence at Pro Musica Hebraica in Washington, DC, and has curated concerts at the Kennedy Center.
  Welcome to Voices on Antisemitism, a podcast series from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum made possible by generous support from the Elizabeth and Oliver Stanton Foundation. I’m Aleisa Fishman. Every month, we invite a guest to reflect about the many ways that antisemitism and hatred influence our world today. From Washington DC, here’s James Loeffler.
  JAMES LOEFFLER
  I grew up playing piano, training as a classical pianist and a jazz pianist, and so I was deeply interested in classical music’s history and naturally curious about where Jews fit into that story. Having been taught about Wagner just as a great German composer, who wrote operas with crazy plots and dramatic storylines, and kind of a really gripping total view of art and theater and music all coming together—that was the Wagner I knew about growing up. I don’t think it was until college, when I opened a book about the history of antisemitism and was surprised to find a chapter that Richard Wagner was one of the forefathers of modern antisemitism. And that came as a great surprise to me, because I didn’t know any of that about him.
  Wagner decided in 1850 to write an essay. And he published an essay in a German newspaper about, as he called it, “Jewry in Music.” He basically began to spout viciously antisemitic ideas about Jews and their role in European culture and their kind of physical limitations as artists, and basically created a whole new strain of what we might call musical antisemitism.
  So in a sense, what Wagner does in the essay is basically say that the Jews can never be truly European, they can never be truly German or French or Russian or Italian, because there’s something about their essence which marks them as different, and because they can’t be that they can’t create the true kind of art that comes from a deep belonging to a nation.
  The Nazi embrace of Wagner is a really interesting phenomenon, both for reasons obvious and less obvious. The first thing to say is Wagner had a grandiose world vision at which he was in the center of redeeming mankind through him and through the German nation. And this is something that clearly resonated with Hitler and with the Nazis as they began to imagine themselves as engaged in something beyond simply fixing Germany or pushing a new political ideology, but actually launching a transformation of the whole world. Wagner promoted an ideal of spectacle. His operas weren’t just operas. He considered them to be a kind of art that would combine theater, literature, language, music, movement—all of these things—ideas, into one kind of total work that would capture the public in a new way. And the Nazis were attracted to that. If you look at the footage of the rallies, the famous Nuremburg rallies and other rallies that the Nazis staged, they wanted to seduce the German people and seduce the world with this image of power, of mythology, mythos, and they got a lot of that from Wagner, not only from Wagner, but certainly a lot from Wagner. Conveniently, he was also an antisemite, and so his kind of greatness made him an icon of German culture, and his antisemitism therefore gave it kind of a seal of approval almost, that the two necessarily went hand in hand. So for Hitler and for the Nazis, these things were all attractive about Wagner.
  The important thing to understand with Wagner is that there’s hard and soft versions of Wagner’s legacy. I think the hard version is the more obvious, but it’s often overstated, and that’s simply that he puts into circulation certain truly virulent myths about Jews and music and antisemitism that become recycled and expanded, amplified by the Nazis later on. The softer version is less known, but its significance may be even greater, which is that in the five decades after Wagner’s death, all across Europe, his ideas began to kind of seep into the way in which musicians thought about Jews and Jewish composers as somehow illegitimate, as somehow incapable of writing their own true music. And that’s a very interesting myth, because it’s not as visible to us today, right? What that meant in practice is that people began to say that, of course Mendelssohn was not as great a composer as Beethoven or as Wagner. Why? Because he was a Jew. So that’s the other legacy, and that’s the legacy, which in some ways actually outlives even the Holocaust, as a kind of antisemitism after the Nazis, that stretches all the way back to Wagner.
  I don’t see the antisemitic language coded through his operas the way some people do. In fact, I feel like it’s kind of a false chase to go looking for it there. I don’t think we have to find antisemitism in every aspect of a great artist’s art to know that it’s part of his ideas. One of the things that I often puzzle over is why there is such a focus only on that kind of narrow question, and not about the other aspects of Wagner’s legacy that continue to shape us today. Which is to say, I’d rather that there was more attention to all the composers negatively affected by Wagner, all the musicians whose lives were disrupted, all the music that he’s pushed out of hearing. A focus on that, instead of a focus on whether or not his overture can be played or his operas can be played. Those are important questions, but sometimes they prove a distraction from the bigger issues about exactly what Wagner contributed to modern antisemitism, and how he distorted our hearing of our own shared musical past.
  ALEISA FISHMAN:
  Voices on Antisemitism is a podcast series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Join us every month to hear a new perspective on the continuing threat of antisemitism in our world today. We would appreciate your feedback on this series. Please visit our Web site, www.ushmm.org.

• Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia Website - http://history.as.virginia.edu/people/jbl6w

  James Loeffler
  Associate Professor
  Personal website james.loeffler@virginia.edu
  Field & Specialties
  Jewish history
  European history
  International history
  Human rights history
  Legal history
  Education
  B.A. Harvard University, 1996
  Post-Graduate Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1997
  M.A. Columbia University, 2000
  Ph.D. Columbia University, 2006
  Dean's Visiting Scholar, Georgetown University Law Center, 2013-2014
  James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow in International Law and Dean’s Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law School. At UVA he teaches courses in Jewish and European history, legal history, and the history of human rights.
  His most recent publications include two books: Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, May 2018), and a co-edited volume, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyering and International Law in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010), won eight awards and honors. Currents works in progress include a new biography of Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and the forgotten political origins of the genocide convention, a co-authored study of early twentieth-century musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn and the birth of cultural Zionism; and an edited collection of essays on new historiography of Zionism.
  His other research interests include international legal history, American Jewish politics, the past and present of Zionism, contemporary Jewish culture and its East European roots, and the history and future of Jewish music. For ten years he served as scholar-in-residence at Pro Musica Hebraica in Washington, DC, where he curated historically-informed concerts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has also served as a consultant to the Center for Jewish History, Carnegie Hall, National Public Radio, and the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, among other institutions.
  Publications
  Books
  Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2018).
  The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought, ed. with Moria Paz (Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming).
  The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010; paperback edition, 2013).
  Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Cultural Studies and Media Studies, Honorable MentionŸ
  Foundation for Jewish Culture Sidney and Hadassah Musher Publication Award for Outstanding First Book in Field of Jewish Studies
  Association for Jewish Studies Cahnmann Publication Award for Outstanding First Book in the Field of Jewish Studies
  American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) Deems Taylor-Béla Bartók Award for Outstanding Ethnomusicology Book
  Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies
  Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature of the Jewish Book Council, Finalist
  Historia Nova Prize for the Best Book on Russian Intellectual History, Long List

  Journal Articles
  "Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin," Journal of Genocide Research 19:3 (July 2017): 340-360.

  "'The Famous Trinity of 1917': Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective," Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Institut 15 (2016): 211-238.

  "Modern Jewish Politics" (Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies) (2017).

  "Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics," Jewish Quarterly Review 105:3 (Summer 2015): 367-398.

  "The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism: The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 Declaration on Human Rights," Journal of Contemporary History 50:2 (October 2014): 274-295.

  “‘In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children’: Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture,” Slavic Review 73:3 (Fall 2014): 585-611.

  "Promising Harmonies: The Aural Politics of Polish-Jewish Relations in the Russian Empire,” Jewish Social Studies 20:3 (Spring/Summer 2014):1-36.

  "The Lust Machine: Commerce, Sound and Nationhood in Jewish Eastern Europe," draft manuscript.

  "How Zionism Became Racism: International Law, Antisemitism, and Jewish Lawyering at the United Nations, 1945-1975," draft manuscript.

  "Did Zionism Destroy Diaspora Nationalism?" draft manuscript.

  "'The Conscience of America': Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American Foreign Policy at the United Nations San Francisco Conference, 1945," Journal of American History, 100 (September 2013): 401-28.

  “‘A Special Kind of Antisemitism’: On Russian Nationalism and Jewish Music,” Yuval Online. Studies of the Jewish Music Research Center (2013).

  "The Holocaust and Human Rights: A New Perspective," in preparation.

  "The Missing Decade: The Forgotten Roots of Raphael Lemkin's "Genocide" in 1920s Polish Zionism," in preparation.

  “Between Zionism and Liberalism: Oscar Janowsky and Diaspora Nationalism in America,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 34:2 (November 2010): 289-308.

  “Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Avraham Zvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100:3 (Summer 2010): 385-416.

  “Israeli Music at 60: New Perspectives,” Introduction and Guest Editorship of Special Issue of Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online 7:2 (2008-2009).

  “Richard Wagner’s Jewish Music: Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture,”Jewish Social Studies 15:2 (Winter 2009 [New Series]), 2-36.

  Book Chapters
  "Hersch Lauterpacht and the Zionist Rights of Man: Rethinking Jewish Legal Internationalism," to appear in The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought, under review.

  “The Unfinished Hebrew Revolution: The Future of Jewish Nationhood in Israel and Beyond,” Imagining Israel in 2040 –Different Visions, eds. Michael Brenner and Pamela Nadell. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017.
  “When Hermann Cohen Cried: Zionism, Music, Emotion,” in Zionism as a Cultural Movement, eds. Israel Bartal and Rachel Rojanski, forthcoming from Brill Publishers.

  "The Features on My Face: Vladimir Stasov, Dmitrii Shostakovich, and Russian Philosemitism Reconsidered," Jewish Music in Eastern and Central Europe. Conference Proceedings, 2011 (in preparation).

  “‘A Special Kind of Antisemitism’: On Russian Nationalism and Jewish Music” and “Three Jews, Two Opinions: Revisiting the Great Yiddish Folk Song Debate of 1901” On the History of Jewish Music in Russia, Volume 3 [Russian], eds. G. Kopytova and A. Frenkel (St. Petersburg: Russian Institute for the History of the Arts), forthcoming.

  “Music,” Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, ed. Dan Diner, in association with the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2014.

  “International Law,” Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, ed. Dan Diner, in association with the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, forthcoming.

  “Joel Engel and the Development of Jewish Musical Nationalism [Russian],” On the History of Jewish Music in Russia. Volume 2. [Russian], eds. G. Kopytova and A. Frenkel (St. Petersburg: Russian Institute for the History of the Arts, 2006).

  English Translation of Vassily Grossman story, “Stary Uchitel’,” in Maxim Shrayer, ed., An Anthology of Russian-Jewish Literature, 1800-2000 (M. E. Sharpe, 2006).

  “Di Rusishe Progresiv Muzikal Yunyon No. 1 af Amerike: The First Klezmer Union in the United States” in American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots, ed. Mark Slobin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

  “Neither the King’s English nor the Rebbetzin’s Yiddish: Yinglish Literature in America,” in American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, ed. Marc Shell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  Internet and Popular Press Publications
  "The Zionist Founders of the Human Rights Movement," New York Times op-ed, May 14, 2018
  "The Third Roth," The Prosen People: Blog of the Jewish Book Council, Dec. 5, 2017
  "How an American Jewish Opera Star Accidentally Launched the Soviet Jewish Movement," Tabletmag, June 30, 2016
  "Wagner's Jewish Followers," Mosaic, Jan. 22, 2015
  "The Death of Jewish Culture Revisited," Mosaic, July 16, 2014
  "Wagner's Anti-Semitism Still Matters," The New Republic, July 4, 2014
  "The Death of Jewish Culture," Mosaic, May 4, 2014
  "Jewish Culture and its Discontents," Mosaic, May 26, 2014
  "Why The New ‘Holocaust Music’ Is An Insult To Music—And To Victims Of The Shoah," Tabletmag, July 11, 2013
  Media Appearances
  Anthony Tommasini, “Two Russian Tours, One Led by Evgeny Kissin, the Other by the American Symphony Orchestra,” New York Times, Dec. 18, 2015
  James Oestreich, "Murry Sidlin's 'Defiant Requiem' Returns to Avery Fisher Hall," New York Times, March 6, 2015
  Anne Midgette, "Evgeny Kissin plays forgotten composers and declaims poetry in stunning performance," Washington Post, Feb. 25, 2014
  Alex Ross, "As If Music Could Do No Harm," New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2014
  Anne Midgette, "Holocaust Music: Art or History?" Washington Post, July 26, 2013

  Current Research
  I work broadly on the intersection of Jewish culture, politics, and identity in modern Eastern Europe, Israel, and the United States, as well as the history of international law, nationalism, and internationalism in the twentieth century. My new book, Rooted Cosmpolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, looks at the Jewish role in building and critiquing the modern human rights movement after World War II, focusing on American, European, and Israeli Jewish political activity in international legal circles and at the United Nations over the period from the 1930s to the 1980s. I aim through this work to rethink Jewish internationalism and the history of modern Jewish politics across the twentieth century, as well as relations between the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Connected to this work, I have just completed a co-edited anthology devoted to Jewish lawyering and international legal thought in the twentieth century.

  In a related project, I reexamine the history of Zionism, offering a new theory of the relationship between Zionism and Diaspora Nationalism in modern Jewish politics. By rereading the political writings of interwar American and East European Zionist leaders, and retrieving forgotten moments in global Jewish political organization (including the 1918 American Jewish Congress, the 1927 European Congress of Minorities, the 1943 American Jewish Conference, the 1945 San Francisco UN Conference, and the 1960 Paris Conference on Soviet Jewry), I argue for a reconceptualization of nationalism, liberalism, and minority rights in twentieth-century Jewish political history. My goal is to demonstrate how Zionist internationalism shaped European, American, and Israeli Jewish attitudes towards modern statehood and global nationhood before and after 1948. I have written a number of articles on this topic, two of which can be found here and here. Eventually I intend to write a new intepretitive history of Zionism based on this work.

  My first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2010), examines the role of music in the formation of modern Jewish national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century Russia. Related articles include studies of antisemitism's impact on modern Jewish culture and the place of music in Zionist and Israeli culture.

  I also have published extensively in the field of Jewish musical studies, with a specialization in the history of Jewish folk and art music traditions in Eastern Europe. Much of this research has informed my current non-academic writing about contemporary Holocaust memory and Jewish cultural identity in American society, including recent articles on "The Death of Jewish Culture" in Mosaic Magazine and "Richard Wagner's Antisemitism," in The New Republic.
  Awards & Honors

  Natan Book Award, Jewish Book Council, Finalist, 2017
  Robert A. Savitt Fellow, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Spring 2015.
  Kluge Fellow, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Fall 2014.
  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Faculty Fellow, 2013-2014.
  Association for Jewish Studies, Board Member, 2013-2016
  Association for Jewish Studies, C0-Chair, Conference Division on Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel and Other Communities, 2014-2015
  Academic Advisory Council, Center for Jewish History, 2011-2014
  Scholar-in-Residence, Pro Musica Hebraica Foundation, Washington, DC
  Non-Resident Research Fellow, Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
  Academic Vice-Chair, The Jewish Music Forum, American Society for Jewish Music, 2006-present
  University of Virginia Buckner W. Clay Endowment Faculty Award, 2011-2012
  American Council for Learned Societies/National Endowment for the Humanities/Social Science Research Council Combined Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research on Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 2009-2010
  University of Virginia Mead Honored Professors Teaching Award, 2009-2010
  Irene Fromer Fellow in Jewish Studies, Columbia University, 2005-2006
  Hays-Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award to Russia and Ukraine, 2003-2004
  National Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2003-2004
  Center for Jewish History Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2002-2003
  Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1998-2002
  Courses Taught
  HIEU 1502 Antisemitism: The Limits of History
  HIEU 1503 Jewish Nationalism in Historical Perspective
  HIEU 2101 Jewish History I: The Ancient and Medieval Experience
  HIEU 2102 Jewish History II: The Modern Experience
  HIME 2012 Israel-Palestine, 1948
  HIST 2559 History of Human Rights
  HIUS 3219 American Jewish History
  HIEU 3452 East European Jewish History and Culture
  HIEU 3559 Nation and Empire in Eastern Europe: Jews, Poles, and Russians in Historical Perspective
  HIEU 4502/5559 History of Human Rights
  HIEU 4502/5559 Law, Violence, and Empire in Modern Europe
  HIEU 5009 The European-Jewish Encounter, 1750-1938
  HIST 5559 Human Rights History
  HIST 7001 Approaches to Historical Study
  HIST 7559 The Historiography of Human Rights
  HIST 9032 Independent Studies with Graduate Students in Modern Jewish History, Jewish Historiography, American Jewish History, Modern Jewish Politics, History of Fascism

QUOTE:
revealing account of complex aspirations for global justice.

Loeffler, James: ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS

Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Loeffler, James ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $32.50 5, 4 ISBN: 978-0-300-21724-7
The history of a campaign for a universal bill of human rights that generated fierce controversy.
Between 1800 and 1940, argues historian Loeffler (History and Jewish Studies/Univ. of Virginia; The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, 2010), the term "human rights" hardly appeared in international law. The phrase surfaced in the middle of World War II but had little to do with the Holocaust. As reflected in the 1948 adoption of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea was intended "to replace the discredited minority rights ideal" with a broadly applicable manifesto. Despite being "the brainchild of American policy makers and intellectuals," the pursuit of human rights involved five Jewish leaders whom the author profiles in a thorough, well-grounded, and often surprising history: Polish-born Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, a lawyer who insisted that any declaration of human rights must be preceded by laws; American philanthropist Jacob Blaustein, a soft-spoken oil tycoon who became chairman of the American Jewish Committee; Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, a British Zionist leader; Lithuanian lawyer and newspaper publisher Jacob Robinson, "one of Europe's foremost champions of minority rights" and "the ultimate internationalist"; and Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, a Zionist youth activist who sympathized with Palestinian Arab refugees, a convert to Catholic mysticism, and a lawyer "disenchanted with the law." Defining and applying human rights incited vehement debate. At the first session of the Commission on Human Rights, held in 1947, members began by arguing "about the philosophical meaning of rights." A declaration draft that emerged contained 400 pages of commentary, each revealing "more ideological clashes." A Saudi representative denounced it "as a forcible imposition of 'Western civilization' on the Islamic world" because it advocated freedom of marriage and religion. Inextricably entangled in the ongoing debates was the connection of human rights to anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Middle East conflict. Zionism, recast as a "symbol of moral parochialism" was seen "as the singular enemy of international human rights."
A revealing account of complex aspirations for global justice.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Loeffler, James: ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700512/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d06bd8a7. Accessed 7 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700512

QUOTE:
The book has much to recommend it.
This book describes the intersection of music, politics, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish identity. It fills an important gap in our knowledge and will rest on the shelf of handbooks for scholars of Russian and Jewish studies.
The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire

Brian Horowitz
Shofar. 31.1 (Fall 2012): p176+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Purdue University Press
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/
Full Text:
The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire, by James Loeffler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 274 pps. $55.00.
Here is a first book from a young scholar on Jewish music in Late-Tsarist Russia. The book has much to recommend it. We find chapters on the central figures, including Anton Rubinstein, Joel Engel, Zisman Kiselgof, and a number of lesser-known individuals. We are also presented with the essential issues of the day, among them: whether Jewish musicians should be accepted in Russian music, how Jewish musicians feel as Jews about their work, whether Jewish music exists as a separate category of music, and whether a modern composer can compose folk music. Richard Wagner's notorious essay, "Judaism in Music" (1850), had a pervasive influence among Russian composers, "society, and educated Jews.
The author's unexpressed, but identifiable thesis is that simultaneously the following were occurring: Jews sought to use their talents in music for social advancement when other avenues were closed to them; Jewish musicians, even those we associate with Jewish folk music, were liberals in the sense that they wanted to participate as equals in at least two contexts, Russian and Jewish music; the government and society were at a loss about how to deal with the many Jewish prodigies. The government gave them access to the St. Petersburg conservatory, but discriminated against them socially. Thus, the last circumstance inhibited the first two, but did not suppress them entirely.
So Jewish musicians fought on two fronts. While they attempted to expand their rights with the goal of achieving equal rights (with the nobility, let it be remembered), they also reserved for themselves the right to identify as Jews and write, collect, and study Jewish music. The biographical trajectory of Anton Rubenstein is emblematic. He converted to Russian Orthodoxy to facilitate his integration, and yet neither he nor his detractors could forget his Jewish origins. He showed an undying interest in Jewish liturgical and folk music and especially in Jewish themes. His opera, "The Maccabees," is an example. Rubenstein's role clearly was to blaze the initial path for others to follow. He did this most effectively by establishing the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory in which many Jews, boys and girls, thrived as musicians and gained upon graduation permanent privileges, such as the right to live in Russia groper (out of the Pale of Settlement).
In the book Professor Loeffler traces the rise of Jewish nationalism and the role of music among self-conscious Jewish intellectuals. Just as in my book on the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment (2009), so too the author discovers that Jewish nationalism emerges not from the folk, but rather the highly acculturated educated elite. Young Jews almost fully russified had to react to antiseinitism, but they also sought to enrich themselves by practicing cultural nationalism. In this case they promoted the appreciation of Jewish music. Their concerts, sheet music, and gramophone recordings acquired enormous success.
Professor Loeffler explicates debates over what constitutes Jewish music. Questions swirl around whether music written by a concrete author constitute folk music or is folk music only music that cannot be attributed to a concrete composer; should music played by Jews but sounding a lot like that played by Hungarians or Czechs be included in the Jewish canon? The author's final verdict, borrowed from Engel, is that whatever sounds like Jewish music is Jewish music. Today's comparative folklore studies offer a porous model of cultural development, but back then these issues were bound up with politics writ large.
My only criticism is that the author underestimates how cosmopolitan a city like St. Petersburg was, despite its anti-Jewish laws. The experience of Jews was clearly two-sided. They lived in a world of full acceptance with allies and friends among the cultural elite, and yet were objects of opprobrium by the state (mainly in the abstract, however, since many of these Jews were invited to court to perform). Although the author explains that Jews who wanted to get closer to the folk found that they could not do so and therefore belonged neither to the Russians nor to traditional Jews, there lacks a discussion about liberalism as an identity, which was a true alternative in late-tsarist Russia. Most if not all the musicians embodied this identity. This book describes the intersection of music, politics, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish identity. It fills an important gap in our knowledge and will rest on the shelf of handbooks for scholars of Russian and Jewish studies.
Brian Horowitz
Tulane University
Horowitz, Brian
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Horowitz, Brian. "The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire." Shofar, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, p. 176+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314035728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ca9a057. Accessed 7 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A314035728

QUOTE:
Highly recommended
accessible, well documented, and well written

Loeffler, James. The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire

L.D. Loeb
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.5 (Jan. 2011): p905.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-2582
ML3776
2009-46398 CIP
Loeffler, James. The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire. Yale, 2010. 274p bibl index afp ISBN 9780300137132, $55.00
Making a major contribution to the musicology of Jewish Europe, Loeffler (Jewish history, Univ. of Virginia) examines the contribution of Russian Jewry to Russian life and the art music of the late-19th- and early-20th-century Russian empire. The evaluation of Anton Rubenstein, of Jewish descent but brought up Russian Orthodox, in facilitating the entrance of Jewish musicians into the conservatories of Russia and subsequent interest in their explorations of Jewish music was a revelation. And his valuable new insights on St. Petersburg's Society for Jewish Folk Music are worthy of careful attention. In tracking the diverse paths of Joel Engel, Joseph Achron, Solomon Rosowsky, and many other composers of note and and also the research into Jewish ethnic music by the pseudonymous S. Ansky and colleagues, Loeffler reveals the largely overlooked contributions of this group to Jewish music specifically and art music generally. The book is accessible, well documented, and well written. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.--L. D. Loeb, University of Utah
Loeb, L.D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Loeb, L.D. "Loeffler, James. The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 2011, p. 905. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249310780/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8a81109e. Accessed 7 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A249310780

QUOTE:
fine study
Those attempting
to configure new possibilities for Jewish art, and indeed
for Jewish identity, in this world will find guides
and soul mates among Loeffler’s Russian Jewish protagonists
of a century ago.
James Loeffler. The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire.
Full Text Available
Review

By: Steinlauf, Michael C. American Historical Review. Dec2012, Vol. 117 Issue 5, p1695-1696. 2p.

JAMES LOEFFLER. The Most Musical Nation: Jews and
Culture in the Late Russian Empire. New Haven: Yale
University Press. 2010. Pp. xi, 274. $55.00.
This fine study examines the development of Jewish
musical culture in Russia from the mid-nineteenth century
to the 1960s. Its primary focus is the two decades
before the region was devastated and transformed by
World War I and the Russian Revolution. This period
has long stood in the shadow of what came after, but
James Loeffler’s exemplary scholarship restores a lost
past and suggests its relevance to our contemporary
concerns.
Loeffler first examines the life of the performer, composer,
and teacher Anton Rubinstein, the founder of
the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Born Jewish but baptized
as a young child (Loeffler calls him a Jewish Christian),
Rubinstein was attracted to Russian, Jewish, and
European musical culture and attempted to reconcile
them. He also struggled with their destructive tensions
in the form of the increasing antisemitism of cultural
figures who accused him of judaizing Russian music and
allowing the conservatory to become a breeding ground
for musicians incapable of understanding the Russian
soul. Indeed, it was the conservatory he founded that
uniquely resisted tsarist quotas on Jewish higher education
from the 1880s on and produced the flood of
Jewish violin virtuosos that later swept the world.
Loeffler documents the complex interplay of Jewish,
Russian, and European musical influences by focusing
on the work of composer-scholar-educators such as Joel
Engel, Mikhail Fabianovic Gnesin, and Lazare Saminsky,
as well as the Society for Jewish Folk Music,
founded in 1908, which became the institutional center
of their work. This was the era when notions of Jewish
nationhood first emerged in a popular context, appealing
both to the Russian-speaking Jewish middle class of
St. Petersburg and Moscow and to small town Yiddishspeaking
Jews. For most, this new consciousness was
not expressed in political but in cultural terms, and
therefore the work of the society proved particularly
timely. It supported an array of initiatives, among them,
S. Ansky and Joel Engel’s famed ethnographic expeditions
to the shtetls of western Russia, where they collected,
among other things, wax cylinder recordings of
Jewish music.
The society’s most popular project proved to be a
songbook intended for Jewish schools that went
through several editions in over a decade. The songbook
included synagogue melodies and chants (trop),
secular folk songs, hasidic tunes (nigunim), as well as art
songs, including a version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s
“Ode to Joy,” from his Ninth Symphony, in which
Friedrich Schiller’s words heralding international
brotherhood appear in Yiddish and Hebrew translations.
All these songs co-existed in the pages of a single
book even as the meaning of “Jewish music” became
the subject of ongoing contention. Were not Yiddish
folk songs or even hasidic nigunim derived from Ukrainian
or Russian models? Did recently composed songs,
for example, the immensely popular “Afn pripetshik”
(On the hearth), not to mention the flood of Yiddish
theater music—so-called shund (trash)—count as authentically
Jewish? Was it possible to transform Yiddish
folk themes into concert music acceptable to the
St. Petersburg bourgeoisie without betraying their
yidishkayt (Jewishness)? Indeed, as Loeffler tells us,
when Y. L. Peretz, the revered “father of modern Yiddish
literature,” arrived in St. Petersburg from Warsaw,
he suggested that Jewish culture could not survive the
long trip to St. Petersburg where “songs will freeze a
little bit” (p. 171). In a subsequent visit to St. Petersburg
to raise funds for Yiddish theater (which Loeffler does
not mention), Peretz insulted his audience of Jewish
philanthropists and stormed out of the banquet hall
when the proceedings, including a speech by the historian
Simon Dubnow, were held in Russian and not
Yiddish. Much to his credit, Loeffler appraises these
many contradictions positively as a source of strength
for a Jewish culture—and Jewish identity—struggling
to define itself. For a brief moment in history, the terms
“Russian,” “Jewish,” and “European” circulated in creative
tension.
But as political ideologies began to overwhelm cultural
concerns, this center, however fluid, could not
hold. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Balfour Declaration
shattered the potential for a creative dialectic
in the development of modern Russian Jewish culture.
Loeffler traces the ensuing “triple diaspora” of its creators.
Some emigrated to the United States, where they
encountered a Jewish identity reduced to religious
terms. In Palestine, the fluid possibilities of Jewish
identity were frozen into Zionism. And for those who
remained in Russia, the brief flowering of a Jewish culture
within a Russian (and pan-European) avant-garde
was smothered by the most brutal “clarification” of all,
the murderous Stalinist “proletarianization.”
Even in a book this good, there are occasional lapses.
Loeffler repeatedly gives the title of a Yiddish song as
“Shloyf mayn kind” (Sleep my child); the imperative of
the Yiddish verb is shlof. More seriously, he states that
when Engel, Ansky, and the young painter Solomon
Yudovin arrived in a Ukrainian shtetl to gather ethnographic
material, the locals did not understand them
because none of the three spoke Yiddish well (p. 87).
This was doubtless the case with Engel, who was raised
in a Russian-speaking family, but certainly not for An
sky, who came from an impoverished Yiddish-speaking
home, nor for Yudovin, who was from a family of Jewish
artisans. The locals most likely had trouble understanding
Ansky and Yudovin’s Lithuanian Yiddish dialect. It
would have also been helpful if the book included a
compact disc with musical examples for those unable to
follow musical notation.
Why were there so many Russian Jewish musicians,
particularly violinists, in the twentieth century? Loeffler
claims that it was because, uniquely among Russian
institutions, the St. Petersburg Conservatory opened its
doors wide to Jews. But while essentialist thinking is
taboo nowadays, can one not also suggest the centrality
of music in premodern Eastern European Jewish life as
a predisposing context for the wave of virtuoso performers
that appeared in the twentieth century?
None of this detracts in the least from Loeffler’s
achievement. His study is not only an important excavation
of the past, but one that speaks directly to the
present. For we have emerged out of the physical and
spiritual devastation of ideology into a world more able,
we hope, to tolerate the heterogeneous. Those attempting
to configure new possibilities for Jewish art, and indeed
for Jewish identity, in this world will find guides
and soul mates among Loeffler’s Russian Jewish protagonists
of a century ago.
MICHAEL C. STEINLAUF
Gratz College

QUOTE:
Loeffler also deepens our understanding of the complex relationship
between Jewish politics and culture in the late imperial period by constructing
a chronology in which, he argues, one or the other became dominant
as a result of historical developments.

When Culture Became the New Torah: Late Imperial Russia and the Discovery of Jewish Culture.
Full Text Available
Review

By: Deutsch, Nathaniel. Jewish Quarterly Review. Summer2012, Vol. 102 Issue 3, p455-473. 19p.

With this as background, Loeffler explores how musicological pioneers
23. Ibid., 114, Loeffler writes, ‘‘Russian Jews looked to the Society for Jewish
Folk Music to do more than simply promote Jewish music. It was expected to
shoulder the responsibility for normalizing the entire relationship between Jews
and music in Russia and European society more broadly.’’
24. Ibid., 7.
25. Ibid., 1.
26. Ibid., 102; on the influence of Wagner in Russia, see also p. 117.
27. Ibid., 173.
.................18250$ $CH5 07-18-12 15:03:53 PS PAGE 468
JEWISH CULTURE IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA—DEUTSCH 469
like Peysakh Marek and Shaul Gintsburg, who collected hundreds of
Jewish folk songs in their landmark volume Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii
(Jewish Folk Songs in Russia), and Joel Engel and Zisman Kiselgof,
who accompanied An-sky on the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition into
the Pale of Settlement, as well as institutions like the Society for Jewish
Folk Music, sought to document and, from another perspective, construct
a Jewish national music. So successful was this project that in 1914 even
Saschetti admitted he had been mistaken in his earlier assessment after
‘‘discovering’’ Jewish music via the Russian Jewish composers and musicians
who populated the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In telling this story
of how Jews came to be seen as ‘‘the most musical nation,’’ Loeffler identifies
and explores a cluster of provocative questions that provoked
debate then and are still relevant today: What is ‘‘Jewish’’ about Jewish
music? If a distinctly Jewish aesthetic exists, can non-Jews create Jewish
music (or Jewish art, more generally)? What are the effects of technology
and commodification on traditional music?
Loeffler also deepens our understanding of the complex relationship
between Jewish politics and culture in the late imperial period by constructing
a chronology in which, he argues, one or the other became dominant
as a result of historical developments. Thus, he asserts that in the
years immediately following the 1905 Revolution, there was an important
shift ‘‘from Russian Politics to Jewish Culture,’’ or as he puts it: ‘‘After
1905, cut off from the possibility of direct involvement in the transformation,
political or otherwise, of Jewish and Russian society, despairing
of an immediate secular redemption, Jews from across the political and
religious spectrum found common cause in the project of modern Jewish
culture.’’28 In this, Loeffler finds common cause with Jonathan Frankel,
who wrote in his final book, Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews: ‘‘When
the radical parties went into catastrophic decline in the decade from 1907
to 1916, it was the intelligentsia again that ensured that the development
of a modern Jewish culture, whether in the Hebrew or the Yiddish language,
would gain momentum.’’29 Finally, while Loeffler treats the Russian
Revolution of 1917 as another turning point in this historical
narrative, he argues that ‘‘Russian Jewish culture began to unravel from
within as early as the first years of World War I, beginning with a now
classical ideological debate over the very Jewishness of Jewish music.
While war and revolution exacerbated the process, it was the resurgence
of Jewish politics coupled with the broader aesthetic challenge of Euro28.
Ibid., 133.
29. Jonathan Frankel, Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews (New York, 2009), 5.
.................18250$ $CH5 07-18-12 15:03:53 PS PAGE 469
470 JQR 102.3 (2012)
pean modernism that led to the decisive breakdown of this cultural movement.’’30
Loeffler downplays the role of the Revolution of 1917 in the ultimate
collapse of the Russian Jewish cultural movement, suggesting that other
factors had already initiated the decline; Kenneth Moss argues that the
Revolution—initially, at least—actually provided the context for a renaissance
of Jewish culture that had both Yiddish and Hebrew branches. In
so doing, Moss turns conventional wisdom on its head by arguing that
instead of revolutionary politics suppressing Jewish cultural activity during
the first phase of the Revolution, a significant number of Jewish revolutionaries
treated the unfolding political events as an opportunity or even
an impetus to engage in what Moss describes as ‘‘the most ambitious
programs of Jewish cultural formation that Eastern Europe had yet seen
or, indeed, would see again.’’31
Indeed, rather than revolutionary politics trumping Jewish culture
during the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Moss argues that for
some figures, at least, the ‘‘Jewish cultural project,’’ as he calls it, trumped
revolutionary politics. Thus, for example, Moss writes that the Yiddish
writer Dovid Bergelson ‘‘lived a second life that was both intimately
linked to his political activism yet profoundly different from it—even
opposed to it. In the name of ‘Jewish culture,’ Bergelson devoted himself
to practices that did not serve any direct political ends and even clashed
with his own political views and the imperatives of the Revolution itself
at critical junctures . . . Thus it was not his socialism but his Yiddishism
. . . that most consistently structured his cultural practice. Indeed, in the
name of the development of a Yiddish high culture, he was willing to
work both with ‘class enemies’ and political opponents.’’32

"Loeffler, James: ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700512/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d06bd8a7. Accessed 7 June 2018. Horowitz, Brian. "The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire." Shofar, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, p. 176+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314035728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ca9a057. Accessed 7 June 2018. Loeb, L.D. "Loeffler, James. The most musical nation: Jews and culture in the late Russian empire." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 2011, p. 905. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249310780/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8a81109e. Accessed 7 June 2018. By: Steinlauf, Michael C. American Historical Review. Dec2012, Vol. 117 Issue 5, p1695-1696. 2p. Subjects: JEWISH music; JEWS; HISTORY; NONFICTION; HISTORY & criticism; RUSSIA; MOST Musical Nation: Jews & Culture in the Late Russian Empire, The (Book); LOEFFLER, James When Culture Became the New Torah: Late Imperial Russia and the Discovery of Jewish Culture. Full Text Available Review By: Deutsch, Nathaniel. Jewish Quarterly Review. Summer2012, Vol. 102 Issue 3, p455-473. 19p.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/rooted-cosmopolitans-jews-and-human-rights-in-the-twentieth-century
  Word count: 173

  Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
  James Loeffler

  Yale University Press 2018
  320 Pages $32.50
  ISBN: 978-0300217247

  The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remained tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• Reviews by Amos Lassen
  http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=63968
  Word count: 529

  “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century” by James Loeffler— The Forgotten Jewish Roots of International Human Rights
  Leave a reply

  Loeffler, James. “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century”, Yale UP, 2018.
  The Forgotten Jewish Roots of International Human Rights
  Amos Lassen
  James Loeffler gives us an original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists.
  2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two important events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The two are tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global anti-Semitism, and American foreign policy. However, the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In “Rooted Cosmopolitans”, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights. He follows them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism.
  The five men we follow are:
  Peter Berenson, British lawyer, Jewidh youth activist and Holocaust rescuer turned Catholic convert and founder of Amnesty International.
  Professor Hersch Lauterpacht, Polish Zionist and founding father of international human rights law and key drafter of the Israeli Declaration of Independence
  Dr. Joseph Robinson, leader of the interwar Lithuanian Jewry and legal pioneer behind the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials and the International Refugee Convention
  Jacob Blaustein, American Jewish leader and chief human rights booster in postwar American foreign policiy
  Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, British Zionist leader turned UN human rights activist
  Here is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a surprising new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are several surprises here and they alone are worth the cost of the book but there is also so much more. I was totally surprised in that I consider myself knowledgeable in Jewish and Israeli history, yet I knew nothing about the five men at the core of the book. I was also somewhat shocked at what the book has to say about Hannah Arendt who, while I do not always agree with her, I have always been stunned by her knowledge and discourse. I believe her to be one of the great mines of the twentieth century.
  We see and better understand the complex aspirations for global justice. Here is reshaped Jewish and human rights history. Loeffler’s research reconstructs the forgotten role of Jewish leaders in creating the architecture of human rights and gives us a nuanced account of the common origin of Zionism and human rights organizations “and of their increasingly tortured relationship.”
  The book challenges orthodoxies both on the right and on the left and it can transform popular understandings of this critical period of history. Loeffler rewrites our received narratives about human rights and Zionism.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-most-musical-nation-jews-and-culture-in-the-late-russian-empire
  Word count: 273

  The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire
  James Loeffler

  Yale University Press 2010
  274 Pages $55.00
  ISBN: 978-0-300-1371-3-2

  Review by Robert Moses Shapiro
  Remarkably, in the decade before the First World War, fully one-third of Russian Jewish university students were studying in the imperial conservatories of music. James Loeffler tells the story of the rise of Russian Jewish musicians and composers during the final generations of Tsarist Russia. The sheer talent of young Jewish musicians came to be recognized as a feature of modern culture in the Late Russian Empire. The St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music, founded by the baptized Anton Rubinstein, attracted a stream of Jewish students who were trained and encouraged in the face of rising anti-Jewish attitudes in general Russian society. Jewish and non-Jewish scholars argued over the nature and value of Jewish music. The final decades of Tsarist Russia saw increasing interest in Jewish folk music and the creation of new Jewish music inspired both by Jewish tradition and the serious standards of modern artistic music. For many acculturated Russian Jews, Jewish folk music came to be part of a new Jewish identity forged amid the dynamic turbulence of Russia’s political culture. This generally well written book would have benefitted from inclusion of a CD sampler of the many musical pieces described. While the text suffers from a few errors in Yiddish transcription, for example, the well-known lullaby by Shalom Aleichem is “Shlof mayn kind” not “Shloyf mayn kind”, overall, this is an excellent work. Bibliography, illustrations, index, maps, music settings, note.

• Israel Book Review
  http://israelbookreview.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-most-musical-nation-jews-and.html
  Word count: 779

  Wednesday, October 18, 2017
  The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire by James Loeffler ( Yale University Press)

  Here is a first book from a young scholar on Jewish music in Late-Tsarist Russia. The book has much to recommend it. We find chapters on the central figures, including Anton Rubinstein, Joel Engel, Zisman Kiselgof, and a number of lesser-known individuals. We are also presented with the essential issues of the day: among them: whether Jewish musicians should be accepted in Russian music, how Jewish musicians feel as Jews about their work, whether Jewish music exists as a separate category of music, and whether a modern composer can compose folk music. Richard Wagner’s notorious essay, “Judaism in Music” (1850), had a pervasive influence among Russian composers, “society,” and educated Jews.

  The author’s unexpressed, but identifiable thesis is that simultaneously the following was occurring: Jews sought to use their talents in music for social advancement when other avenues were closed to them; Jewish musicians, even those we associate with Jewish folk music, were liberals in the sense that they wanted to participate as equals in at least two contexts, Russian and Jewish music; the government and society was at a loss about how to deal with the many Jewish prodigies. The government gave them access to the St. Petersburg conservatory, but discriminated against them socially. Thus, the last circumstance inhibited the first two, but did not suppress them entirely.

  So Jewish musicians fought on two fronts. While they attempted to expand their rights with the goal of achieving equal rights (with the nobility, let it be remembered), they also reserved for themselves the right to identify as Jews and write, collect, and study Jewish music. The biographical trajectory of Anton Rubenstein is emblematic. He converted to Russian Orthodoxy to facilitate his integration and yet neither he nor his detractors could forget his Jewish origins. He showed an undying interest in Jewish liturgical and folk music and especially in Jewish themes. His opera, “The Macabees,” is an example. Rubenstein’s role clearly was to blaze the initial path for others to follow. He did this most effectively by establishing the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory in which many Jews, boys and girls, thrived as musicians and gained upon graduation permanent privileges, such as the right to live in Russia proper (out of the Pale of Settlement).

  In the book Professor Loeffler traces the rise of Jewish nationalism and the role of music among self-conscious Jewish intellectuals. Just as in my book on the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia, 2009), so too the author discovers that Jewish nationalism emerges not from the folk, but rather the highly acculturated educated elite. Young Jews almost fully russified had to react to anti-Semitism, but they also sought to enrich themselves by practicing cultural nationalism. In this case they promoted the appreciation of Jewish music. Their concerts, sheet music, and recordings on a gramophone acquire enormous success.

  Professor Loeffler explicates debates over what constitutes Jewish music. Questions swirl around whether music written by a concrete author constitute folk music or is folk music only music that cannot be attributed to a concrete composer; should music played by Jews but sounding a lot like that played by Hungarians or Czechs be included in the Jewish canon? The author’s final verdict, borrowed from Engel, is that whatever sounds like Jewish music is Jewish music. Today’s comparative folklore studies offer a porous model of cultural development, but back then these issues were bound up with politics writ large.
  IsMy only criticism is that the author underestimates how cosmopolitan a city like St. Petersburg was, despite its anti-Jewish laws. The experience of Jews was clearly two-sided. They lived in a world of full acceptance with allies and friends among the cultural elite, and yet were objects of opprobrium by the state (however mainly in the abstract, since many of these Jews were invited to court to perform). Although the author explains that Jews who wanted to get closer to the folk found that they could not do so and therefore neither belonged to the Russians or traditional Jews, there lacks a discussion about liberalism as an identity, which was a true alternative in late-tsarist Russia. Most, if not all the musicians, embodied this identity.

  This book describes the intersection of music, politics, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish identity. It fills an important gap in our knowledge and will rest on the handbooks shelf for scholars of Russian and Jewish studies.

• Wall Street Journal
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/rooted-cosmopolitans-review-of-persons-and-peoples-1525818083
  Word count: 1174

  QUOTE:
  Loeffler, who teaches history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia, is wonderfully alive to the contest’s complexity as well as to the inventiveness of the contestants,
  Each was a passionate, sometimes vindictive mix of beliefs that changed with circumstances.

  ‘Rooted Cosmopolitans’ Review: Of Persons and Peoples
  It is no surprise that 20th-century Jews, who until the creation of Israel had no state dedicated to their interests, were the fathers of human rights. Martin Peretz reviews “Rooted Cosmopolitans” by James Loeffler.
  ‘Rooted Cosmopolitans’ Review: Of Persons and Peoples
  PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
  By Martin Peretz
  May 8, 2018 6:21 p.m. ET
  9 COMMENTS
  For some 70 years, the words “human rights” have been talismanic—a shorthand for the elusive modern dream, that of universal recognition of the rights of persons and minorities, rights that precede and transcend politics. But like most talismans, its real meaning is obscured by constant use: “Human rights” has also become a collection of attitudes and sociological signifiers, a vague term to be dismissed by realists and swooned over by idealists. James Loeffler’s book “Rooted Cosmopolitans” is a bracing and nuanced attempt to correct this—to restore a grave, complex, powerful idea by tracing it to the people, most of them Jews, who argued it into existence.

  The subject is both clear and impossibly complicated. From 1880 to 1950, peoples and individuals across the world mixed at a density and magnitude unprecedented in human history. In the face of this mixing and its disruptions, philosophies developed that rejected any concept of essential human equality; that mandated racial and economic differences as the determinative human distinctions; and that, when such distinctions were applied to real politics, killed millions. In the face of this slaughter, an answer to the question of why people have rights simply by virtue of being people, and how to secure those rights in practice, was desperately needed. But the philosophical questions underlying the question—how to define those who conceived of themselves as both individuals and parts of groups, and what legal and political designations these philosophical definitions might mandate—did not by their nature have singular answers.

  That many of the competing answers were offered by Jews isn’t a coincidence. Sharing no state dedicated to their interests, spread from Russia to Germany to Morocco to America (and to China and Argentina), Jews were joined across distances but internally distinct like no other people. Their shared goal was to save their people, but their solutions were shaped by the specificity of their contexts.

  Yiddish Jews were one recognized minority group in the ethnic hodgepodge of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the only group whose status wasn’t consonant with a piece of land. Their philosophy defined “people” as individuals who were also bounded by group membership. They therefore saw a world of peoples, equal yet incommensurable, that would mix and separate—organized into states coextensive with their heritage; committed to protecting minorities living in the state as their own minorities would be protected abroad; and presided over by an international body to whom grievances could be addressed. One of these states would be Israel, a homeland for Jews in territory sanctified for them by heritage and history.

  ‘Rooted Cosmopolitans’ Review: Of Persons and Peoples
  PHOTO: WSJ
  ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS
  By James Loeffler
  Yale, 362 pages, $32.50

  Western Jews lived in capitalist democracies defined by immigration, assimilation and mobility of labor. To them, the world was made up of individuals organized into states gathered in an international community, in which global organizations worked with powerful states to regulate a more peaceful world. Ethnic, racial, religious, national or regional groups seemed like handy organizing principles through which the individual might find meaning, but irrelevant and dangerously exclusionary at the level of philosophy or politics.

  The contest between these two philosophies happened over two world wars and two postwar peaces. Mr. Loeffler, who teaches history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia, is wonderfully alive to the contest’s complexity as well as to the inventiveness of the contestants, including Jacob Blaustein, oilman turned founder of the American Jewish Committee; Maurice Perlzweig, founder of the World Jewish Congress; Hersch Lauterpacht, Polish-born judge at the Nuremberg Trials; Jacob Robinson, Lithuanian-born co-founder of the Institute for Jewish Affairs; and Peter Benenson, British founder of Amnesty International. These were highly educated, ambitious outsiders riding a sea of currents and undertows, from the League of Nations to the United Nations. Each was a passionate, sometimes vindictive mix of beliefs that changed with circumstances.

  These circumstances were raw systems of power that decided the global order. Britain and then America and the U.S.S.R. set the terms, and they looked askance at the Yiddish idea of “peoples” for philosophical reasons as well as practical ones. Britain wanted its colonies, America wanted to ignore its “black” problem, the Soviets were against allowing any ethnic distinctions, and the principle of self-determination for peoples mandated against these preferences.

  There was also bad history behind the decisions. Thanks to Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations enshrined the idea of minority protections, but the League of Nations failed, and the United Nations responded to this failure by eliding distinctions between peoples rather than addressing them. Over time, elision became neglect: Partial articulations of a world of peoples were conflated with the very toxic particularism they had been created to realistically combat.

  Israel embodies the elision. A state of individuals that’s a product of the world of peoples, it’s a pluralistic place often condemned as an “identitarian” throwback because it’s a home for the Jews. Mr. Loeffler diligently traces this widening fracture point. He describes Hannah Arendt’s “citizen of the world” (“I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective”), the dominant vision when it comes to cultural capital and global power, universal yet somehow exclusionary. For the people who lived it, a world of peoples was a brute reality and a realistic ideal: As the novelist Herbert Gold said of Yiddish Jews persecuted by ethnicity-averse Soviets, “They just want to go. They see themselves as Jews and Israelis, detained in exile.”

  Mr. Loeffler puts himself not on one side or the other of the divide. What he puts himself against is elision. The question of what rights humans should have based on their humanity is a question of philosophy, of the way people are and how we describe them, and so it should never be not contested. When we stop debating and arguing, we lose the language to account for visceral human realities and needs. That’s a dangerous place to be in, and we may already be there.

  Mr. Peretz was from 1974 through 2011 the editor in chief of the New Republic.

  Appeared in the May 9, 2018, print edition as 'Of Persons And Peoples.'

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-jewish-campaign-to-establish-global-human-rights-after-the-holocaust/2018/06/15/a8f264a8-4bfe-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_st
  Word count: 1259

  QUOTE:
  This superb book is a homage to visionary cosmopolitans dedicated to the creation of human rights in a world too often lacking in humanity.

  The Jewish campaign to establish global human rights after the Holocaust

  By Thane Rosenbaum June 15
  Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist and distinguished fellow at the New York University School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. His forthcoming book is entitled "The High Cost of Free Speech: Rethinking the First Amendment."
  Thane Rosenbaum, a novelist, essayist and distinguished fellow at NYU School of Law, is the director of the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. He is the author of the forthcoming “The High Cost of Free Speech: Rethinking the First Amendment.”

  People seek, or claim to possess, a variety of rights: constitutional, civil, political, economic and cultural. Human rights, which many people believe are guaranteed, are arguably the best known and the least understood.

  The notion of human rights began to take shape after the Holocaust, so it is not surprising that Jews played an important role in their emergence. In his enlightening new book, “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century,” James Loeffler, a historian at the University of Virginia, explores how a small group of Jewish lawyers and activists from around the world inspired the human rights movement and the creation of entities such as the United Nations that, sadly, have failed to fulfill the promises of their ideals.

  [Awakening to the depth of American anti-Semitism]

  Loeffler’s important insight is that the story of human rights actually begins after World War I. The creation of the League of Nations in 1920 and its adoption of Minority Treaties were motivated largely by Jews who had survived the pogroms of Eastern Europe and realized that minorities needed protection under the emerging principles of international law. Countries wishing to join the League of Nations had to agree to the conditions of Minority Treaties that required them to confer basic rights on their inhabitants regardless of religion, race, nationality or other differences from the majority population. There was uneven compliance among member states, but the concept of mandating special provisions for minorities had been introduced into international law.

  The Jewish lawyers and activists in Loeffler’s study pursued universal human rights, but not without a more particular objective. For most of them, human rights coincided with advocacy for a Jewish state, an inseparable idea demonstrated by Israel’s founding in 1948, the same year as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These human rights pioneers included Hersch Lauterpacht, a Polish Zionist who founded international human rights law; Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian involved in the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials; Jacob Blaustein, a valuable confidante of American presidents; Maurice Perlzweig, a British Zionist and law professor; and Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, Catholic convert and founder of Amnesty International.

  “Rooted Cosmopolitans,” by James Loeffler (Yale University Press)
  Working as legal advisers within their host governments and heading up organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, they initiated an entirely new concept of global consciousness and human responsibility. At the same time, they were creatures of their origins, profoundly influenced by their Jewish roots as cosmopolitans in foreign lands and forever mindful that a Jewish state did not yet exist.

  Each came to realize how human rights exposed a crack in the fantasy of nations united in a common cause. The Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century produced the concept of natural rights and the social contract, ideas that are today embodied in liberal societies governed by Western democratic principles. These include civil and political freedoms, such as speech and assembly; a free press and an independent judiciary; and popularly elected representatives. These natural rights are the foundation for America’s Bill of Rights.

  However, natural rights are not always accorded to noncitizens and to minorities, and they are usually denied to people living outside of liberal societies. That’s why human rights were conceived: as rights owed to humanity itself — hence the name — regardless of where people live and under what manner of governmental rule. But these rights often can exist only with the assistance of and adherence to international law, a relatively new concept itself. Without international organizations such as the United Nations, its member states and human rights groups, there is no one to monitor and, when necessary, intervene to enforce those rights.

  What the protagonists of Loeffler’s story tragically came to realize about univeral human rights is that nations have little incentive to interfere in the affairs of other states, and that the United Nations is a largely feckless entity. Absolute sovereignty is the coin of the realm among nations. Each country preserves its right to treat its citizens in whatever way it wishes, regardless of what human rights mean to people living elsewhere. The founders of human rights in “Rooted Cosmopolitans” had naively assumed that nations would exercise sturdier moral leadership in this regard. They most assuredly did not count on global moral failure, with states abdicating their collective duty to watch over humanity.

  “Rooted Cosmopolitans” provides a tutorial on how the best intentions may simply not find a willing audience. Repeatedly these men are seen flashing their diplomatic skills, trying to persuade nations to make difficult choices on behalf of a unified humanity. Being Jewish may have inspired their humanistic initiatives, but they were not parochial Zionists, although they were accused of this very thing. They were committed to protecting the citizens of the world as well as their fellow Jews. With each setback, most of these men were drawn closer to Israel as both a model of self-determination and a refuge for a people whose global vulnerability demonstrated why human rights, and a homeland of their own, were urgent priorities.

  [Book review: ‘Israel: Is It Good for the Jews?’ by Richard Cohen]

  Zionism always has been a quest for self-determination and human rights. Advocating for both a Jewish homeland and global human rights are not contradictions. Yet the very idea of Jewish nationhood has perpetually infuriated the human rights community. For them, the one Jewish country in the world is deemed a colonialist enterprise rather than a national home for a once-persecuted, stateless people. Israel’s existence, for many, inverts the human rights paradigm: a liberal democracy that simultaneously denies Palestinians basic rights and a homeland of their own.

  Loeffler’s book might leave readers to wonder whether nationalism and human rights are somehow identical yet irreconcilable objectives. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict surely stands as evidence of this global conundrum. What is to be done when a minority is not looking for civil rights but rather a country of its own? Must every minority be granted a homeland in order to achieve human rights?

  The book neatly weaves seemingly disparate events in the halting march toward human rights, such as Cold War realpolitik and fearmongering, which stalled the development of human rights, and the Swastika Epidemic, a revival of antisemitism that spread swastika graffiti around the world in 1959 and 1960.

  This superb book is a homage to visionary cosmopolitans dedicated to the creation of human rights in a world too often lacking in humanity.

  ROOTED COSMOPOLITANS
  Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
  By James Loeffler

• New York Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/jews-human-rights-last-tzaddiks/?printpage=true
  Word count: 4838

  The Last of the Tzaddiks
  Ralph Alswang/Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
  Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum and others protesting in support of
  ‘Dreamer’ immigrants, Washington, D.C., January 2018
  David Shulman
  JUNE 28, 2018 ISSUE
  Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
  by James Loeffler
  Yale University Press, 362 pp., $32.50
  The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights
  by Michael Sfard, translated from the Hebrew by Maya Johnston
  Metropolitan, 509 pp., $35.00
  In the somewhat exotic Jewish home in
  Iowa where I grew up, it was axiomatic
  that there was an intimate link between
  Judaism and universal human rights. Like
  nearly all Eastern European Jewish
  families in America, my parents and
  grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats,
  to the point of fanaticism. They thought
  that the Jews had invented the very idea,
  and also the practice, of social justice; that
  having started our history as slaves in
  Egypt, we were always on the side of the
  underdog and the oppressed; that the core
  of Judaism as a religious culture was
  precisely this commitment to human rights, and that all the rest—the 613 commandments,
  the rituals, the theological assertions—was no more than a superstructure built upon a
  strong ethical foundation. For me, this comfortable illusion was shattered only when I
  moved to Israel at the age of eighteen.
  There is indeed, as James Loeffler shows in Rooted Cosmopolitans, a strong historical link
  between European Jews and the struggle for human rights in the twentieth century.
  Loeffler tells the stories of remarkable people such as Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, born near
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  Lemberg (Lvov) in 1897, who was one of the first jurists to engage seriously with the idea
  of a binding international law encompassing universal human rights (he wrote preliminary
  drafts of both the International Bill of Rights and Israel’s Declaration of Independence);
  Jacob Robinson, who played an important part in designing the United Nations
  Commission on Human Rights as well as in the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials; and Peter
  Benenson, who founded Amnesty International in 1961 (three years after he had converted
  to Catholicism).
  Several of Loeffler’s heroes emerged from the political and cultural matrix of post–World
  War I Eastern Europe and from the struggle for what was then termed “minority rights.”
  The Jews of Eastern Europe, always vulnerable to attack by anti-Semitic nationalist
  majorities, provided the paradigm for this discussion, which, as we know too well,
  collapsed with the rise of the Nazis. Before that, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Weimar
  Germany had been the great hope and model for attempts to enshrine national minority
  rights in political and legal practice in the nations created after World War I.
  urprisingly little of the language of minority rights has survived into our generation,
  except perhaps when it is given a negative connotation, as in a recent speech by Israel’s
  current minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked: “There is place to maintain a Jewish majority
  [in Israel] even at the price of violation of [minority] rights.” In another formulation:
  “Zionism should not—and I’m saying here that it will not—continue to bow its head to a
  system of individual rights interpreted in a universalist manner.” To some it might seem
  strange that Israel’s minister of justice is the sworn enemy of the country’s highest court,
  which is committed to upholding Israel’s Basic Laws. These provide (in lieu of a
  constitution) the legal basis for human rights, widely defined, among other matters; they
  include the landmark 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty.
  Though Lauterpacht and Robinson were legal superstars during the short-lived heyday of
  the League of Nations, Loeffler’s account of their quixotic struggles is replete with irony.
  Both were ardent Zionists who saw no conflict between Jewish nationalism and the
  struggle for universal human rights: “Zionism, minority rights, Lithuanian independence,
  and European democracy—all went hand in hand.”
  Reading Loeffler, one can’t help but notice how the Jewish fight for rights as a national
  minority within rabidly nationalist Central and Eastern Europe merged, after an
  unthinkable catastrophe, with the struggle for a Jewish nation-state in Palestine that now,
  seventy years later, discriminates against its own Arab minority within the Green Line (the
  pre-1967 border) and savagely persecutes millions of Palestinians in the occupied
  territories. Many would argue that this present situation is an aberration from the ethical
  goals set forth in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promised that the new state
  would be based on “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” and
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  that it would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
  irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Others see in this stark devolution a palpable danger
  inherent in modern ethnic nationalism anywhere.
  There were also dissenting voices among the Jewish humanist intellectuals whom Loeffler
  describes, including Jacob Blaustein, a confidant of Harry Truman and a consistent voice
  in favor of universal ethics in preference to, and ultimately at the expense of, narrowly
  nationalist (Zionist) goals. Indeed, Blaustein was overtly antinationalist; in his view,
  Zionism should “be reduced to a philanthropic refugee resettlement plan for Palestine,”
  though by 1947–1948 he had come to support the United Nations resolution on the
  partition of Palestine. Blaustein’s position, which he claimed was drawn from classical
  Jewish philosophy, found its strongest expression in the Declaration of Human Rights of
  1944, which in turn contributed to the formulation of the UN Charter not long afterward.
  Interestingly, Loeffler has very little to say about the older Jewish sources relevant to this
  theme of universal rights. Perhaps it’s just as well: one can easily exaggerate their
  influence and wonder about their rationale. Take, for example, the famous Talmudic ruling
  that a Jew is allowed to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save a human life. I and many
  others have often found comfort in this rule. However, as Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi
  have shown, in the premodern sources it applies only to saving a Jewish life; it can be
  stretched to include the life of a non-Jew only if there is a danger that by not saving that
  life the Jews may face reprisals from their non-Jewish neighbors (mi-shum eivah). So
  much for universal ethics. Opinions still vary as to whether Leviticus 19:18, “Love thy
  neighbor as thyself,” is similarly limited to one’s Jewish neighbor, as the earlier part of the
  verse suggests (“thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy
  people”). I have had occasion to witness bitter debates on this text between Israeli peace
  activists and religious Israeli settlers on the West Bank. You can guess which interpretation
  the latter prefer.
  n Israel, however, one can still find some unusually courageous figures committed to the
  prophets’ ideal of justice. Among them is Michael Sfard, who in one sense follows in the
  line of Loeffler’s exemplary figures and, in another sense, transcends them by far. He
  embodies their belief that there is an international legal, normative consensus on what
  constitutes inalienable human rights, and on which acts by modern nation-states have to be
  defined as criminal in this domain. But unlike them, Sfard is a battle-hardened activist for
  human rights in the Israeli courts, where he has argued landmark cases, with enormous
  consequences for the Palestinian civilian population in the territories.
  Sfard’s The Wall and the Gate tells the story of that struggle, which he shares with other
  brilliant anti-establishment lawyers such as Avigdor Feldman, Felicia Langer, Leah
  Tsemel, Gaby Lasky, Elias Khoury, Tamar Peleg-Sryck, and Eitay Mack. These people
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  operate in an impossibly hostile political and social environment. They have analyzed the
  situation in the occupied territories with sober clarity and drawn the necessary, practical
  conclusions. Their most important virtue is dogged persistence, which at times attains
  heroic proportions and even, though unfortunately rather rarely, achieves meaningful
  successes.
  It is not obvious that the Israeli Supreme Court should have become the ultimate arena for
  this struggle. The High Court, like the various lower courts in Israel, is an integral part of
  the institutional fabric of the Israeli state; its justices are by no means immune to
  contamination by a hypernationalist ideology. In practice, they tend to accept, more or less
  without question, the often secret recommendations of the Israeli security forces;
  arguments that include a security aspect regularly trump arguments based primarily on
  ethical principles.
  The military courts that try Palestinians in the territories exemplify this to an extreme
  degree. A Palestinian brought before such a court, for example in the notorious Ofer
  Prison north of Jerusalem, has no hope of achieving even the slightest semblance of
  justice. Conviction rates of Palestinians in these courts are higher than 99 percent.
  Proceedings take place in Hebrew, which Palestinian defendants often don’t understand,
  and security specialists routinely give secret testimony to which defendants and their
  counsel have no access.
  Unlike the military courts, the High Court of Justice is often sensitive to both ethical
  considerations and international treaty law, though I agree with Sfard that “reviewing the
  legal conflict over the settlements, it is hard to imagine a more colossal failure.” He is
  talking about a moral failure, not only a legal one. At the very beginning of the settlement
  enterprise, which was entirely rooted in the theft of Palestinian land, the court probably
  could have ended, or at least significantly restricted, this unfolding disaster, still the major
  stumbling block to any future peace agreement. As Sfard says, after describing the legal
  test cases in great detail, the court chose not to go that route—“a choice made of free will.”
  hat story of how the Israeli legal system, at the highest level, pronounced the wholesale
  appropriation of Palestinian land by the state to be “kosher” has been told in these pages
  more than once; there is no need for me to repeat it here. Sfard highlights in his opening
  chapter and at other points in his riveting book a moral quandary derived from those early
  court decisions. It was most starkly articulated some ten years ago by Ilan Paz, a former
  head of the Civil Administration—the Israeli army unit that administers the occupied
  territories—at a conference of Israeli NGOs active in Palestinian rights:
  Without human rights organizations, there is no occupation…. The army and the
  mechanisms that control life in the area rely on what human rights organizations do,
  on the fact that you represent Palestinians and bring their requests, needs, and
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  demands to its people. Thanks to you, the most acute issues are resolved and major
  incidents are avoided, both locally and in terms of how the world sees things. To a
  great extent, your actions allow the occupation to go on.
  Put simply: Israeli human rights activists working in the occupied territories manage at
  times to correct egregious abuses on the local and individual level and thus enable Israeli
  governments to claim—falsely—that the occupation is not indifferent to the basic needs of
  the occupied.
  Paz was referring not only to actual litigation in the courts but also to the daily efforts of
  an impressive spectrum of organizations: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel,
  B’Tselem, HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Ta’ayush, MachsomWatch,
  Rabbis for Human Rights, Haqel, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, Molad: The Center
  for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, and Breaking the Silence, among others. These
  groups accompany Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their fields and grazing grounds
  and protect them from the predations of Israeli settlers and soldiers; they provide a
  restraining presence at the innumerable checkpoints and roadblocks manned by soldiers;
  they publicize routine criminal acts by military units operating in the territories; they offer
  emergency medical care to Palestinians unable to reach clinics and hospitals in the West
  Bank or in Israel; and, with particular emphasis, they are part of the unending legal battle
  for Palestinian lands, residency rights, and personal security, as well as a host of other
  pressing human rights issues.
  Clearly, there is a problem here both of long-term strategy and of principle. Given the
  disappointing record of the High Court on issues involving Palestinian rights and lands,
  Sfard and several of his colleagues briefly considered boycotting the court or limiting their
  appeals to cases of acute humanitarian urgency (such cases are, unfortunately, all too
  common). “After all,” Sfard writes, “the Supreme Court had gone ahead and approved
  almost every harmful policy and practice pursued by the military in the Occupied
  Territories.” Has the very act of arguing such cases before the court made human rights
  lawyers like Sfard complicit, in some sense, in the ongoing, systemic evil of the
  occupation?
  This is not a new question, and the integrity of courtroom lawyers is not the only thing at
  stake. In 1983, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, a well-known South African
  professor of law, Raymond Wacks, called on judges of conscience who knew the apartheid
  system was morally repugnant to resign their posts. Such judges were, he said, effectively
  imparting legitimacy to the regime. A lively debate developed; a particularly cogent
  response was published by the eminent jurist John Dugard (later UN special rapporteur on
  the Occupied Territories in Palestine). Dugard argued that there was more to South African
  law than the racist principles of apartheid and that a conscientious judge still had some
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  W
  Corinna Kern/Reuters
  Protesters at a rally against the Israeli government’s plan to
  deport African migrants, Tel Aviv, April 2018
  freedom, however limited, to protect
  human rights—and a duty to exercise that
  margin of freedom.
  We in Ta’ayush, Arab–Jewish Partnership,
  have faced versions of this argument many
  times. We have had considerable success
  in restoring Palestinian lands to their
  rightful owners and in protecting the
  civilian Palestinian population from
  attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Are
  we still, however, oiling the gears of the
  occupation machine? In some sense, we
  are. Once a BDS (Boycott, Divestment,
  Sanctions) activist who had read one of my reports from the field accused us of
  normalizing the asymmetrical relation between occupier and occupied and thus
  maintaining the unacceptable status quo. I can understand the logic of this claim, which
  restates discussions we have had among ourselves. But I think the dilemma outlined by
  Sfard and others is, in fact, far less agonizing than it might seem.
  hat is a decent human being supposed to do in the face of devastating threats to human
  dignity and basic human rights? Are we to turn our backs on our Palestinian friends in the
  South Hebron Hills and stand idly by while the state demolishes their homes, arrests them,
  and expels them from their lands? When the goal is saving lives, livelihoods, homes, and
  land, one doesn’t cling to ethical purity; one takes advantage of every crack or chink in the
  system.
  It is not surprising, then, that human rights lawyers have kept on hammering at the High
  Court, despite their frequent losses, even as they recognize that the courts will never be the
  appropriate mechanism for achieving structural and political change. “Nonparticipation is
  not always a viable option,” Sfard writes. “A human rights worldview does not condone
  sacrificing the individual for the greater good (especially when this good is speculative
  and indirect).” There is every reason to believe, on the basis of long experience, that the
  Israeli government, if freed from even the mild constraints that human rights activists
  provide, would be only too happy to carry out in full the default policy of the right: violent
  expulsions of Palestinians and annexation of their land. In recent months, these policies
  have accelerated at many points in the occupied territories, including Susya, Khan alAhmar,
  and the northern Jordan valley. Just last month, on May 24, the Supreme Court
  ruled that the government can proceed with its plan to expel the Khan al-Ahmar Bedouins
  —several hundred people—from their homes just off the Jerusalem–Jericho road and to
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  demolish, along with their tents and shacks, the first school they’ve ever had, built there in
  recent years.
  Sfard and his colleagues have had some signal victories. Foremost among them was the
  1999 High Court decision prohibiting torture in interrogations of Palestinian detainees
  suspected of involvement in terrorism. Before the decision, Palestinians arrested by the
  Shin Bet were routinely tortured to elicit information and confessions. The state and the
  Shin Bet ardently defended these practices, claiming that they were necessary in cases of a
  so-called ticking bomb, that is, a terrorist attack about to take place—though the vast
  majority of interrogations were not framed so dramatically but served only to amplify the
  data on Palestinians that the security services continually seek to compile. At a
  conservative estimate, many thousands of Palestinian arrestees were tortured, often
  severely, over the two or three decades before 1999.
  The High Court postponed serious consideration of this issue for years, until it was forced
  by public pressure and activist litigation to confront it. Under the enlightened leadership of
  Aharon Barak, the court ruled, on moral grounds articulated in international law, that
  torture was illegal under most circumstances. That “most” was part of a significant
  loophole that allowed the security services to have an internal consultation when there was
  a perceived need for physical pressure on suspects. Torture has significantly diminished in
  Israel in recent years, but it has not disappeared, as a recent report published by the Public
  Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) makes clear.
  Sfard was also involved in mostly frustrating litigation against the proposed route of the
  separation barrier set up during the second intifada, nearly all of it on Palestinian land
  inside the West Bank, at some distance from the Green Line. The route was chosen by
  government planners operating on the assumption that the barrier might become the future
  border of the state, so it was drawn to keep to the west of the barrier every possible Israeli
  settlement in the territories. Huge tracts of Palestinian land were thereby effectively
  annexed to Israel, and many villages were ravaged, losing access to fields and grazing
  grounds. The High Court gave its blessing to this entirely dubious, not to say criminal,
  route.
  But Sfard and others persuaded the judges to order significant adjustments at sites such as
  Bil’in—which became a focus for popular, nonviolent resistance to the barrier and its
  annexationist trajectory—and a cluster of villages near the settlement of Alfei Menashe in
  the north-central West Bank. Thousands of acres were restored to their Palestinian owners.
  Inevitably, the dilemma outlined above surfaced again: by arguing for changes in the route
  before a court that had already accepted the premise that the barrier would be built deep
  within Palestine, “the lawyers behind the litigation became part of the creation of the
  barrier.”
  4
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  Sfard is perfectly aware of the complexities—legal, moral, political, human—inherent in the
  situation in which he and his colleagues operate. Israel and occupied Palestine are
  laboratories for existential and ethical experiment; one way or another, everyone makes his
  or her choices day by day. Most ordinary, decent Israelis acquiesce passively to the horrors
  of the occupation (a sizable minority actively supports the settlement enterprise).
  Sometimes, however, protest erupts in unexpected ways. The Israeli government has
  recently begun deporting asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea. Close to 40,000 were
  scheduled for deportation or, if they refused to go, for open-ended incarceration in
  miserable conditions. The Israeli government was ready to pay the governments of
  Rwanda and Uganda to take these people, as later became clear. Very real, possibly lifethreatening
  dangers awaited the deportees in these countries, including possible
  confiscation of their identity papers, the theft of their possessions, physical abuse,
  imprisonment, extortion, and the threat of being forcibly repatriated to their countries of
  origin (both South Sudan and Eritrea are engulfed in nightmarish violence). Most of these
  refugees have been in Israel for close to ten years; Hebrew is now their primary language;
  their children go to Israeli schools; for all intents and purposes apart from citizenship,
  these people are Israelis.
  An unprecedented wave of popular protest brought many thousands of Israelis to the
  streets. El Al pilots and flight crews refused to fly the deportees to their deaths. Doctors,
  academics, lawyers, and many ordinary citizens, including Holocaust survivors and their
  relatives, spoke out. Some synagogues joined the struggle. Many stressed the unthinkable
  cognitive dissonance that arises from watching a Jewish state, founded by refugees from
  lethal oppression, sending tens of thousands of desperate African refugees to an unknown
  and precarious fate.
  To add to the bitter irony, Gil Naveh, the spokesman for Amnesty International Israel,
  issued a statement demanding that Israel halt the deportations at once. The government,
  said Naveh, was using “hate speech” to dehumanize African asylum seekers as
  “infiltrators,” “criminals,” and “economic migrants” in order to rationalize their expulsion.
  In practice, most of their applications for asylum were never examined by the authorities,
  and those that were examined were almost invariably rejected. Sfard, in a recent interview
  in Haaretz, said:
  The only explanation that I can find for the deportation [of the Africans] is that they
  have brown skin…. Everything about the asylum seekers’ story and about Jewish
  history should lead to the conclusion that we are the first among all nations that
  should have embraced them.
  In March, when it turned out that there was no agreement with Rwanda and Uganda to
  protect the refugees (Netanyahu, as usual looking for a scapegoat, foolishly accused the
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  S
  New Israel Fund of having ruined the deal he thought he had with Rwanda), the
  government’s scheme collapsed under the weight of public pressure and the intervention of
  the High Court. Netanyahu then announced a reasonable plan worked out with the UN
  High Commissioner on Refugees, whereby nearly half of the asylum seekers would be
  absorbed by Western countries and the rest would be allowed to stay in Israel; less than a
  day later, he reneged, caving in to pressure from the right and, some say, his wife and son.
  The threat of mass deportations has thus not disappeared, but so far the High Court, under
  Chief Justice Esther Hayut, has refused to sanction the state’s pitiless design.
  Meanwhile, the government, driven by its extremist coalition partner the Jewish Home, is
  furthering a bill aimed at bypassing the High Court altogether by allowing a simple
  majority of sixty-one members of the Knesset to override the court’s rulings, particularly
  in cases involving basic human rights. This move is the most far-reaching attack ever
  made on the fundamental structure of Israeli democracy. If the bill passes, it will enshrine
  a tyranny of the majority and undermine the very concept of inalienable rights. We have
  come a long way from the days of Lauterpacht and Robinson.
  o to return to our point of departure: Is there something recognizably Jewish, however
  we define the word, about the work of people like Michael Sfard or the public campaign in
  Israel to save the African refugees? It’s possible that Sfard himself and his colleagues
  would underplay this theme. They would certainly want to put themselves in the company
  of outstanding Palestinian human rights lawyers such as Elias Khoury, Muhammad
  Dahleh, and Quamar Mishirki. Like the Ta’ayush activists with whom I’ve worked, these
  unassuming figures invariably think of themselves as simply trying to do the right, human
  thing under extreme conditions—the antiheroic ideal of “common decency” that Albert
  Camus eloquently recommends toward the end of The Plague.
  The Jews have, needless to say, no monopoly over such sentiments, but they do, despite
  everything, have an inescapable affinity with them. Not even fifty years of occupying and
  colonizing Palestinian land can entirely vitiate the empathy for the oppressed that is the
  Jews’ historic inheritance—though it is possible that the occupation is itself a cruel and
  distorted mutation of that same traumatic history. It is, however, a deep betrayal of one
  major strand of the tradition that predates, by many centuries, Enlightenment attempts to
  define universal values.
  There have always been prominent voices like that of the Talmudic Hillel sage: “Where
  there is no one, try to be a human being” (my somewhat modernized translation).
  Sometimes I hear those words in my mind when soldiers are about to arrest us in South
  Hebron or when Israeli settlers try to kill us with heavy rocks, as happened last February
  10 on the way from al-Tuani to Tuba. As has been the case throughout Jewish history,
  humane voices such as Hillel’s are today at war with sanctimonious, atavistic ones such as
  5
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  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  those that now dominate the public sphere in Israel. But as Sfard says in what might be the
  most important line of his book, “The fight isn’t over.”
  Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 221. ↩
  Most recently by Raja Shehadeh, “This Land Is Our Land,” January 18, 2018; and my “Occupation: ‘The Finest Israeli Documentary,’” May
  22, 2014. See also Eyal Press, “How the Occupation Became Legal,” NYR Daily, January 25, 2012. ↩
  “T.M. Krishna in Israel: Criticism, and a Response by David Shulman,” The Wire, February 4, 2017. ↩
  “Independent Report on Israel to the UN Committee Against Torture Towards the Review of the Fifth Periodic Report on Israel,” March 1,
  2016. ↩
  Ethics of the Fathers, Chapter 2. ↩
  RELATED
  This Land Is Our Land
  Raja Shehadeh
  Israel: The Broken Silence
  David Shulman
  How the Occupation Became Legal
  Eyal Press
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• Forward.com
  https://forward.com/culture/404024/where-jewish-rights-and-human-rights-intersect-and-diverge/
  Word count: 1082

  ooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

  By James Loeffler

  Yale University Press, 384 pages, $32.50

  Following Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1942 that the war against fascism would “end with the enthronement of human rights,” the phrase, which had rarely been used in the discourse of international law, began to gain currency.

  Policymakers, however, did not agree about the content or form of human rights. Jacob Robinson, a Lithuanian Zionist who would help design the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and serve on the Nuremberg and Adolf Eichmann prosecution teams, pointed out that the Anglo-American Atlantic Charter established the unqualified right of every nation-state to create laws that “may not recognize any human rights at all.” Hersch Lauterpacht, a Polish-born lawyer who would help draft the International Bill of Human Rights and Israel’s Declaration of Independence, agreed that the “Achilles’ heel of the natural rights of man” was the reality that all rights “are subject to the will of the State.” The “ultimate safeguard” for human rights, Lauterpacht maintained, would reside in a body of rules, “voluntarily accepted or imposed by the existence of international society.”

  In “Rooted Cosmopolitans,“ James Loeffler, a professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia, tells the little-known — and fascinating — story of Robinson, Lauterpacht and three other founding fathers of human rights: Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, a British Zionist; Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, and Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. As he corrects the “collective amnesia” that surrounds the historical record, Loeffler makes a compelling case that “the political and moral dilemmas facing Jews today” are exacerbated by a “lazy dichotomy” between nationhood “that is positioned in opposition to the world” and human rights universalism “that pretends to come from nowhere.”

  In the 1920s, Loeffler reveals, the (now much maligned) League of Nations came close to addressing a fundamental aspect of human rights. Convinced that Zionism and protection of Jews living in Europe were complementary goals, Robinson enlisted an improbable ally, Weimar Germany, which wanted to assist Germans residing in nine countries, while re-establishing its influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Admitted to the league in 1925, Germany pushed for reforms guaranteeing the rights of minority groups. A new model of “transnational nations,” unfettered by geographical boundaries, Robinson opined, might well replace the tyranny of the states-only system.

  In 1929, Germany announced a “Year of Minorities” diplomatic initiative; in concert with the Congress of European National Minorities, Robinson called on the league to fulfill its mandate obligations to assist Jews in Palestine and act on behalf of imperiled Jews in Poland and Lithuania. Determined to retain complete control over its colonies, Britain and France blocked these initiatives in 1930. Within a few years, Loeffler reminds us, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Carl Schmitt, the Third Reich jurist, mocked Jews “who exist without land, without state.”

  Surprisingly, Loeffler tells us that league members continued to defend minority rights and in 1933 forced Germany to restore the rights of Jews in Upper Silesia. Germany’s pledge, however, was followed by an announcement that Germany was withdrawing from the league. The Nazis subsequently banned the word “minorities,” recognizing in law only a hierarchy of nations.

  Robert Loeffler, author of “Rooted Cosmopolitans.”
  Jack Looney

  Robert Loeffler, author of “Rooted Cosmopolitans.”

  Predicated on a theory of reciprocity — I protect your minority, you protect my minority — the Minorities’ Initiative, Robinson quipped, evidently had a codicil: “I hit my Jews, you hit your Jews.”

  When it got its name and was incorporated into the U,N., Loeffler demonstrates, human rights remained an arena for hopes and fears. Witness to the establishment of the State of Israel and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 was a turning point for Jews and human rights. As Israel dealt with Arabs in the Jewish state and the occupied territories, it became clear that national sovereignty was both a fundamental source of rights for individuals and groups and a potent threat to them.

  Marked by “the tainting of nationalism by the radicalism of Third World anti-colonialism,” as Loeffler points out, the 1960s witnessed “the beginning of the end of the grand romance between Jews and human rights.” While Israelis justified the kidnapping and prosecution of Eichmann as a defense against anti-Semitism and a guarantor of Jewish survival, critics asserted that the former Nazi’s human rights had been grossly violated. The Eichmann case, they added, should have been referred to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Israel, Loeffler writes, was acquiring an image as a parochial state, at odds with universalist values.

  Most important, the results of the Six Day War stimulated the “increasing demonization” of Israel, the once “plucky David now recast as Goliath,” for denying basic rights to stateless Palestinians. Israelis and their diasporic Jewish supporters maintained that they had to balance national security with civil liberties. But Amnesty International joined the U.N. as a “hostile forum,” blasting Israel for its tribalism. On November 10, 1975, the U.N General Assembly voted 72–35 (with 32 abstentions) to approve a resolution branding Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

  Rooted Cosmopolitans
  Rooted Cosmopolitans

  Loeffler notes that Israelis and American Jews differ about the nature, extent and necessity of violations of the rights of Palestinians. They do not agree, as well, about whether, as Lauterpacht once maintained, Israelis will be forced to struggle with an issue that “lies so conspicuously on the borderline of law and a most intractable problem of politics,” unless a two-state solution is implemented.

  That said, it seems clear that, for decades, the U.N. has held Israel to a different human rights standard than the one it sets for any other country. Along with the U.N. and Amnesty International, Loeffler concludes, Israel is a “Prisoner of Zion.” The phrase, he writes, captures how the Jewish state is “the source of heightened Jewish vulnerability and the best solution to it,” a signifier of parochialism and universalism. And so it will remain as long as “Jews and others grapple with the entangled braids of American power, Jewish sovereignty, and human rights.”

  Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

  Read more: https://forward.com/culture/404024/where-jewish-rights-and-human-rights-intersect-and-diverge/

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/jewish-internationalism/
  Word count: 2886

  A State of Their Own: Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights
  June 6, 2018
  Gil Rubin reviews James Loeffler’s Rooted Cosmopolitans

  James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, 384 pp., $32.50
  In a 1938 speech in Prague, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the right-wing Zionist revisionist movement (the predecessor of Israel’s present-day ruling Likud party), lamented the decline of support in European capitals for the League of Nations. The League, he asserted, “is an eternal body! And it would ultimately become our ruling body!” Jabotinsky’s vow of allegiance to the League seems peculiar. Why would a right-wing Zionist leader so vigorously defend an international institution, and do so at a moment of crisis in which it seemed to have lost many of its other defenders? For Jabotinsky, the future of Zionism and the Jewish people depended on the success of the League. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Great Powers designed a minorities protection regime in Eastern Europe to be supervised by the League that provided Jews and other minorities with limited group rights. And the League was entrusted with overseeing the British administration in Palestine – making sure that the imperial authorities were developing the territory as the “national home” of the Jews, as the terms of the mandate stipulated. As Jabotinsky saw it, the interests of Jewish nationalism and those of the interwar experiment in internationalism were deeply intertwined.

  As James Loeffler shows in Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, this fusion between Zionism and internationalism was central to an entire generation of Jewish political activists and international lawyers. Loeffler weaves together in vivid detail and captivating narrative the biographies of five figures whose careers traversed the trajectories of Zionist politics and internationalist commitment – among them Polish international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, who famously coined the legal neologism “crimes against humanity”; Lithuanian Jewish rights defender, Jacob Robinson; and British Zionist leader, Maurice Perlzweig. Robinson, for example, fought for the rights of Jews and other minorities in the Lithuanian parliament, was a key member of a pan-European minority rights NGO, and petitioned the League to address violations of Jewish rights. Lauterpacht, whose early Zionist activism is recovered for the first time by Loeffler, spent his early career explicating the meaning of the mandate system in international law. Devoted Zionists, both Robinson and Lauterpacht envisioned these twin legal innovations as the basis for a satisfactory solution of the “Jewish question”: the millions of Jews living throughout Eastern Europe would thrive as a protected minority while Jewish pioneers and refugees would be free to develop a national center, and ultimately a state, in Palestine.

  This interwar Zionist-internationalist nexus, Loeffler argues, also proved central to some of the most important innovations made in international law after World War II. Recent work on the topic – most notably, Phillip Sands’ East West Street – has emphasized the Eastern European Jewish context that gave rise to Lauterpacht’s concept of “crimes against humanity” and Raphael Lemkin’s invention of the concept of genocide. Making use of stunning archival discoveries, Loeffler delves deeper to show that this Jewish context was a specifically Zionist one. Just a few years after Lauterpacht shaped the charge of individual criminal responsibility under international law in the Nuremberg Trials, he assiduously worked on a draft of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. And as Loeffler has shown in another recent piece, as a lawyer in interwar Poland Lemkin wrote a series of advice columns on Jewish minority rights, and celebrated Jewish national achievements in Palestine, before hiding his Zionist past and recasting “genocide” as a vision born out of a universalist pedigree. Peter Benenson, another central figure in Loeffler’s account, spent his early days vacationing with Chaim Weizmann’s family, was consumed by the plight of German Jewish refugees in the 1930s, and admired the Zionist politics of Perlzweig, before converting to Catholicism and establishing Amnesty International several decades later.

  Loeffler’s recovery of the Zionist roots of postwar international law sets the stage for the central argument of his book – a reinterpretation of the relationship between Zionism and human rights in 1948. Loeffler argues that Jewish international lawyers and activists saw the “dual incarnation” of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine and the United Nations’ adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) as “two sides of the same coin.” “This sequence was more than an accident of timing. It was a logical consequence of the fact that the same dramatis personae populated both stories.” Much like the League’s twin programs of minority rights and the mandate, defenders of Jewish rights envisioned the State of Israel and the UDHR as complementary instruments. The rights of Jews in Israel would be guaranteed through citizenship in a nation-state, while the rights of Jewish communities in the diaspora would be defended through international human rights law. Indeed, Loffler shows that many Jewish-rights advocates sought to infuse the nascent legal instruments of the postwar human-rights regime with the spirit of group protection, transplanting the interwar vision of minority rights into the postwar order. His main protagonists – Lauterpacht, Robinson, and Perlzweig – could easily tread between promoting human rights in the halls of the United Nations and defending Zionism because they saw no tension between the two policies. If we now think of Zionism and human rights as a contradiction in terms, it is only because, Loeffler argues, the politics of the Cold War and the Arab Israeli conflict politicized Jewish activity in the United Nations, making it impossible to insulate Jewish-rights advocacy from the conflict in Israel/Palestine.

  This is a counter-intuitive and provocative claim, and it will be at the center of the many debates this study is sure to elicit. One point of critique is that there is very little room in Loeffler’s account to explain how the actions of Israel – the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the occupation and military rule over Palestinians after 1967 – constrained the possibility of being at once a vigorous Zionist and a staunch human-rights defender. But another critique is that, in my opinion, Loeffler simply does not tell the main story about what transpired in the relationship between Zionism and Jewish internationalism in the postwar period. His biographical focus leads him to tell a story of overwhelming continuity, in which Zionist activism for minority rights and mandatory Palestine is seamlessly replaced by advocacy for human rights and the nation-state of Israel. But what is missing from this narrative is an account of the growing separation of Zionism from Jewish internationalism: between the wars Loeffler’s protagonists represented a mainstream vision of Zionist politics, but after the war their political program was pushed to the margins.

  Jewish internationalism – the idea of protecting Jewish rights and security by imposing restrictions on the sovereignty of states – originated in the nineteenth century and was focused on the plight of the Jewish masses in East Central Europe and Jewish communities under Ottoman rule. It was promoted by the organized leadership of the newly emancipated Jewish communities in France and Britain, and later Germany and the United States, represented in organizations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the American Jewish Committee. Through advocacy in a series of international conferences and public campaigns these organizations drew on the diplomatic machinery of the Great Powers, and the nascent European international legal system, to protect Jews from their rulers. This vision was motivated in part by a sense of shared Jewish ethnic and religious solidarity. But it was also motivated by Western European Jewish apprehensions over the fate of emancipation in their own countries. Emancipation was tied to a discourse on Jewish cultural and racial affinity. But if most Jews lived as persecuted minorities, could a Jew in France really claim to be more akin to a Frenchman than to a Jew of the Polish Shtetl? Jewish rights had to be fought everywhere for them to rest on a firm foundation anywhere. From the late nineteenth century, Jewish internationalism also became motivated by a desire to curb waves of east-west Jewish migration. By protecting Jews where they lived, Jewish internationalists reasoned, their push to immigrate would subside, preventing the emergence of new “Jewish problems” in Western Europe.

  Theodor Herzl, who organized the first Zionist Congress in 1897, shared the vision that the “Jewish question” in Europe required an international solution, even as he decried the politics of the organized Western European Jewish leadership. Herzl famously turned to the German emperor and the Ottoman Sultan in the hope of gaining an international charter for a territory that would become a future Judenstaat. But for the most part, the Zionist movement, as it developed in the crowded space of Jewish nationalism in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe – alongside Bundists and other diaspora nationalists and autonomists – sought to promote its political goals within, rather than from above, the state. Zionists and other Jewish nationalists joined the struggle of various European minorities to reform the Habsburg and Tsarist empires into multiethnic federations with extensive autonomy for their nationalities. Zionism had little room in the politics of Jewish internationalism, not least because Western European Jewish leaders feared that any association with Jewish nationalism would call into question their own politics of belonging.

  At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Zionism and Jewish internationalism were fused together. The British mandate over Palestine tied the interests of the Zionist movement with those of the world’s largest empire and its first international organizations. The minorities protection regime, though it fell short of the earlier dreams of Zionist leaders for Jewish autonomy, nonetheless codified group rights into international law. The reincarnation of empire as international law proved disappointing to many national movements, but it was very beneficial to the Jews. It established mechanisms for taming the excesses of ethnic nationalism in Eastern Europe, and for thwarting the development of an indigenous national movement in Palestine. Western European Jewish organizations also warmed up to Jewish nationalism now that it had the stamp of approval of the British Empire and the League. This situation gave rise to what Loeffler describes in his book as the “trinity of 1919,” an interwar political vision that saw three separate solutions to the Jewish question – equality in Western Europe, group protections in Eastern Europe, and a small and gradually developing national center in Palestine. Even as the system of minority protection unraveled in the 1930s, and Britain turned away from privileging Jewish aspirations in Palestine, Zionist leaders remained committed to this program, having no other allies than the British Empire and the now defunct League.

  After the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Zionism and Jewish internationalism began to part ways. The Nazis displaced millions of Jews throughout Eastern Europe, and the local populations had taken hold of many of their properties and professions. Several Eastern European leaders insisted that they would not confiscate the plundered loot from their ethnic majorities just so that Jews could reintegrate after the war. This situation took place at the same time Eastern European Governments in Exile and Allied leaders planned to expel millions of minorities after the war. Many Zionist leaders concluded that the fight for new international guarantees for Jewish rights in these new realities was futile and that the Zionist movement should focus exclusively on plans to transfer millions of Jews to Palestine. If on the eve of the war Jabotinsky still celebrated the League, just several months after the outbreak of war he would virulently attack those Jewish internationalists who lobbied the Allies for new protections for Jewish rights. “[Jews] are taking part in spreading the illusion,” Jabotinsky wrote, that a day after victory “… the world will be repaired … and that a reconstructed League of Nations will watch over [our brothers].” “Enough with the lie! It is as if Jews have become mad, and have begun plotting their own destruction.”

  After news of the extermination of Jews had begun reaching London, New York, and Palestine, the tensions between Zionism and Jewish internationalism grew ever stronger. With the prospects of just a small Jewish remnant in Eastern Europe after the war, there was no longer need for the two programs of international Jewish rights protection and nation-building in Palestine. If the two visions were fused together during the interwar period, now they were in direct competition – who will get to speak for the Jewish remnant? In 1944, a representative of the World Jewish Congress – the emergence of which as the most prominent Jewish internationalist organization Loeffler details in his book – asked the Zionist leadership to join a conference that would reiterate the broad support of Jews for both international rights protections and statehood in Palestine. But David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Zionist executive, promptly refused. “When there were 18 million Jews in the world, and 9 million of them lived in Europe,” one member of the Zionist executive observed, “we could support the ‘luxury’ of Jewish rights in the diaspora,” but now it was too late.

  Robinson was far closer to the views of Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion than to those that Loeffler ascribes to the cadre of Jewish postwar internationalists. In late 1942 Robinson, in fact, urged the leadership of the World Jewish Congress to forgo entirely its advocacy for minority rights and focus exclusively on Jewish aspirations in Palestine, but his superiors rebuffed him. Thereafter he continued to fight for Jewish rights but did so as a reluctant internationalist. Though the archives are filled with his legal memos and reflections on international conferences, this material need not necessarily be construed as a sign of his political devotion. Robinson was, after all, a career internationalist – and writing legal memos and going to international conferences is what career internationalists do. When an opportunity emerged in the late 1940s, Robinson quickly left much of his work for international organizations and assumed a position for the Israeli government.

  The marginalization of Jewish internationalism within Zionist politics was compounded by several developments that completely transformed its playing field. The achievements of Jewish internationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were based in no small part on the Great Powers’ unfounded and outsized perceptions of Jewish power. After the war, however, the myth of Jewish power – though not entirely supplanted – was now joined by widespread perceptions of Jewish powerlessness. Whereas in 1919 Jews secured minority protections and a promise for a Jewish national home in Palestine, in the various international conferences in the immediate postwar years Jews were scarcely allowed to present their demands officially. Loeffler beautifully captures the mood of humiliation among Jewish internationalists who traveled from the 1945 San Francisco Conference to the Nuremberg Trials to the 1946 Paris Conference only to learn, as Perlzweig painfully put it, that “we cannot even add our voice to the formal proceedings.”

  Still, Loeffler ends up telling a story in which Jewish internationalist are overall content with what they get, and view their meager achievements as a basis for a new human rights order, even though, as Robinson observed, “it is obvious that the Big Powers will not commit themselves to an International Bill of Rights.” Robinson’s perspective is crucial. Historians have recently highlighted that the Great Powers envisioned human rights as a watered-down form of minority rights, a program exempt from the more elaborate enforcement mechanisms that characterized the League, which would allow them to reduce their international legal obligations. Human rights were a rather minor part of the Allies’ postwar agenda, and it was only the explosion of human rights politics in subsequent decades that bestowed on 1948 the aura of a transformative legal moment. Marginalized within the Zionist movement, operating without any power real or perceived, and trying to shape a system the Allies had no interest in bolstering, Jewish internationalists could do very little.

  The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 served as the final blow to the nexus between Zionism and Jewish internationalism. Protection of Jewish rights mattered a great deal when there was nowhere Jews could immigrate. But after 1948 immigration to Israel, rather than international-rights protection, repeatedly emerged as the preferred solution to Jewish crises. Loeffler reconstructs an amazing episode in which Jewish-rights defenders in 1948 drew on the new legal conception of “genocide” to try to protect Jews in Arab countries from widespread outbursts of anti-Jewish violence. But after their failure, the fate of Jews in those countries was soon, for the most part, resolved through large-scale immigration to Israel. The legacy of 1948 is, then, perhaps not, as Loeffler argues, that a Jewish state and human rights emerged as complementary programs for the global defense of Jews, but rather that the vast majority of Zionists and many Jews concluded that the only way to gain the rights they sought was through membership in a state of their own.

  Gil Rubin is an Israel Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, and Co-Chair of the Jews in Modern Europe Study Group at the Center for European Studies. He is writing a book, The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Order.

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• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/76683/notes-underground
  Word count: 1478

  Notes from Underground
  By ADAM KIRSCH
  August 2, 2010

  In December 1913, the St. Petersburg-based Society for Jewish Folk Music celebrated its fifth anniversary with a competition for the best Jewish opera. The prize was 3,000 rubles, and the response—as James Loeffler writes in his excellent new book—was overwhelming. Submissions flooded in from “Jewish bandleaders in Russian army units…theater musicians, cafe orchestra conductors, big-city synagogue choir directions, and small-town music store owners.” But the most poignant entry that Loeffler mentions came from a nineteen-year-old composer named Aaron Avshalom, who explained that he was the descendant of Caucasian Jews, raised in Siberia by a family with Chinese and Japanese servants, who was now studying medicine in Switzerland. Given this exotic biography, which put him at a great remove from the centers of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Avshalom apologized if his Jewish opera was not Jewish enough. “My soul sings with Jewish melodies,” he insisted, even as he admitted that “it is altogether possible that there is very little Jewish element” in his work. In any case, he wrote, “I want very much to familiarize myself with the form of Jewish melody.”

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  A Jewish composer who cannot write Jewish music, who loves Jewish melodies but is not sure what makes a melody Jewish: these paradoxes, Loeffler shows, were not confined to the exotic Avshalom. They were at the very heart of Jewish thinking about music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And Loeffler, a musician who is also a professor of Jewish history at the University of Virginia, proves that debates about music were, in turn, at the heart of Russian Jews’ attempts to understand their place in the world. Combining the disciplines of history and ethnomusicology, and working with archival sources in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Loeffler gives substance to his claim that “Jewish musicians, with … their struggle to prove that a Jewish ‘national music’ existed and to determine its proper sound … produced some of the most interesting and heretofore overlooked expressions of Russian Jewish identity.”

  The tendency to overlook music in the writing of Jewish history goes back a long way, Loeffler writes—all the way to Simon Dubnow, the pioneering Russian Jewish historian. While Dubnow called for the study of all manner of Jewish sources, from government archives to tombstone inscriptions, he specifically omitted folk music from his purview: “I have not named Jewish folk songs in the list of sources, for the simple reason that we practically have none, at least, none with historical significance.”

  This insistence that the Jews had no music of their own was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century discourse, ironically shared by Jews and anti-Semites. To Richard Wagner, in his notorious essay “Judaism in Music,” it was axiomatic that Jews could not create truly original music, because they were interlopers in European culture. To Jewish nationalists, on the other hand, the music most characteristic of Ashkenazi Jews, from wedding dances to Hasidic melodies, was suspect because it had features in common with the music of the neighboring Slavic peoples. In 1915, the Jewish composer Lazare Saminsky launched what Loeffler calls “one of the most important chapters in the history of modern Jewish culture” when he published an essay arguing that only liturgical music was genuinely Jewish—indeed, he believed it could be traced back to the era of the First Temple—while secular and folk music was a mere import, “little more than ‘Polish folk dances,’ ‘altered versions of German and Ukrainian folk songs,’ and borrowings from ‘Oriental music.’ ” Saminsky employed the disturbing, pseudo-biological rhetoric of the period when he declared that such folk tunes “cannot become the embryos for the growth of national-musical organisms.”

  To an age that saw folk music as both a legitimation of national identity and the basis for high art—as in the work of the Czech Dvorak and the Finn Sibelius—the apparent absence of a Jewish musical tradition was both a cultural problem and a political one. It was especially strange because, famously, a huge proportion of Russia’s best musical performers were Jews. One of the central subjects of The Most Musical Nation is the fate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which was founded in 1861 by Anton Rubinstein, a baptized Jew who was one of the century’s most renowned musicians. Very quickly, the conservatory became a magnet for Jewish students. Not only was it one of the only educational institutions in Russia not to have a Jewish quota, but its graduates enjoyed legal privileges otherwise unattainable for most Jews—for instance, the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement.

  As a result, by 1913, Loeffler writes, more than 50 percent of the school’s students were Jewish—this at a time when other universities set a Jewish quota of 3 percent. Isaac Babel, in his famous story “Awakening,” bitterly criticized the mania of Jewish parents in Odessa for turning their children into violin prodigies: “Our fathers, seeing no other escape from their lot, had thought up a lottery, building it on the bones of little children.” Yet there was no denying that, for the winners of this Jewish musical “lottery,” the prize was enormous. Violinists such as Jascha Heifetz became world famous, and Loeffler writes that the “line of Jewish violin prodigies eventually became … arguably the single most important phenomenon in the modern history of the classical violin.”

  Yet even at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, myths of Jewish creative sterility circulated freely. In an anecdote of his student days, the composer Mikhail Gnesin—who would go on, in Soviet times, to write the first piece of music commemorating the Holocaust—recalled being told by a professor that “among my students, I have had a seriously large number of Jews … they shine fantastically, they perform superbly in the course, technique comes very easily to them. And yet when they leave school they immediately harden, their brains just shut down. They cannot create anything original.” No wonder, then, that it was students from the St. Petersburg Conservatory who joined together to launch the Society for Jewish Folk Music, an organization dedicated to researching, publishing, and performing the Jewish music that was alleged not to exist.

  The founders of the Society for Jewish Folk Music built on the work of Joel Engel, another central figure in Loeffler’s book, who was one of the first people to study Jewish folk music seriously. Engel was passionate about Jewish music precisely because he had grown up knowing little about Judaism: “I transcribed and studied Jewish melodies not because I was Jewish, but much more the opposite—the more I worked with them, fell in love with them, the more Jewish I became,” he said. In 1912, Engel and the writer S. An-sky launched the landmark Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Expedition, traveling through the Pale of Settlement to record Jewish folk music and culture before it was lost to modernization. Tellingly, Loeffler writes, when Engel and An-sky tried to converse with their coachman, their Yiddish was so bad he would only reply in Ukrainian. Like so many modern Jewish intellectuals, they were in search of a Jewishness they no longer possessed.

  The work of Engel and the Society helped to popularize Jewish folk music—though, as Loeffler shows, some of the alleged folk tunes were actually published compositions of fairly recent vintage, which had spread so widely that people thought they were vernacular and traditional. It also helped to inspire new art music by Jewish composers, such as Joseph Achron, whose popular “Hebrew Melody” for violin and piano is the only piece Loeffler subjects to detailed musical analysis. But the work of these Jewish musicians, like the work of the Hebrew and Yiddish “culturists” whom Kenneth Moss wrote about so well in his recent Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, was cut artificially, and brutally, short by the advent of communism. The surviving members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music dispersed to Israel and the United States, or continued to work under the very different conditions of Stalinism. “In all three places,” Loeffler concludes, “it was primarily the memories, the memoirs, and the reflections on the past that took the place of the music itself.” But then, as Loefller’s important book shows, the music itself had never been extricable from the thoughts, the hopes, and the fantasies that its listeners imposed on it.

  Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic. A version of this piece originally appeared in Tablet Magazine.

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