Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists

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 remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. 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.

• Antisemitism: Here and Now
• Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History
• Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War
• The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion
• Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
• HIAS Haggadah
• The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky
• Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor
• Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s
• (((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump