James Loeffler visited UC Santa Cruz to deliver the annual Diller Lecture, connecting the Center for Jewish Studies to the theme of Data and Democracy.
James Loeffler, “The Right to Be Heard – Jews, Human Rights, and Global Democracy”
February 20, 2019 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
At the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn
The seventieth anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2018 comes at a time of crisis for global democracy and growing questions about the liberal international order. In this talk, James Loeffler draws on his new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, to revisit the 1948 moment in which modern human rights was born together with the post-imperial nation-state. Questioning the standard narrative of human rights as a postwar response to the Holocaust, this talk will show how the rise of human rights represented a forgotten marriage between nationalism and internationalism, which raised new challenges and opportunities for minorities and stateless peoples to find justice in the global legal order.
James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia.