Summary: James Loeffler discusses his book Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. We talk about why the history of human rights matters, and how it fits into modern Jewish history: Who were the Jews who played a role in the shaping of the idea of human rights and its legal framework, how it was that they were both interested in the particular rights of Jews and the universal rights of all human beings, how the state of Israel fits into all of this, and what this tells us about the nature of human rights within the context of the history of the twentieth century as well as today.
