James Loeffler
Research Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University

James Loeffler is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is co-editor of the Association for Jewish Studies Review. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities, he also pursued post-graduate study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he remains Research Affiliate of the Jewish Music Research Center. He has held fellowships from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Library of Congress, the Center for Jewish History, the Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. His scholarship has been honored with book awards from the American Historical Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Sami Rohr Prize Foundation, and the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers.

Current research: He is presently writing a book about antisemitism and civil rights in modern American history. He is currently researching the connection between interwar Polish Jewish politics and international legal thought through the biography of Raphael Lemkin, originator of the Genocide Convention. With Prof. Edwin Seroussi (Hebrew University) he is researching Zionism and music in the life and afterlife of the Hebrew scholar/activist Avraham Zvi Idelsohn.

Selected Publications

The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century, ed. with Moria Paz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010; paperback edition, 2013).

“Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research, 19:3 (Aug. 2017): 340-60.

“Nationalism without a Nation? On the Invisibility of American Jewish Politics,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105:3 (Summer 2015): 367-98.

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