(Commentary) As James Loeffler contends in “Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century,” the true origins of human rights can be traced back even further in time. “Much of what we think of today as post-World War II international human rights began life as a specifically Jewish pursuit of minority rights in the ravaged borderlands of post- World War I Eastern Europe,” writes Loeffler, a UVA professor of history and Jewish studies.