Dr. James Loeffler

Professional Background

Dr. James Loeffler is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.  He possesses skills in English, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Polish, and German.  While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Loeffler conducted research on his project, “The Holocaust and Human Right: A New Interpretation.”

Dr. Loeffler’s many publications include The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2010); “‘The Conscience of America’: Human Rights, Jewish Politics, and American Foreign Policy at the United Nations San Francisco Conference, 1945”, Journal of American History, September 2013; and “‘In Memory of Our Murdered (Jewish) Children’: Hearing the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish Culture”, Slavic Review 73:3 (Fall 2014): 585-611.

Fellowship Research

For his Robert A. Savitt Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advance Holocaust Studies, Dr. Loeffler used the collections from the World Jewish Congress, the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the Central Jewish Committee of Jews in Poland to disentangle the threads of Holocaust and human rights in mid-century Jewish legal activism.

Dr. Loeffler was in residence at the Mandel Center from February 1 to April 30, 2015.