Norton Congratulates Dr. James Loeffler, D.C. Resident, for Prestigious Kluge Fellowship

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today congratulated District of Columbia resident Dr. James Loeffler for being selected as a Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Center brings together scholars and researchers from around the world to utilize the Library's vast resources, and to leverage their research through meaningful interactions with policymakers and the public. As a Kluge Fellow, Dr. Loeffler is working on his current book project, The Vanishing Minority: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, looking at the roles of Jews in building and critiquing the modern human rights movement after World War II through the 1980s. Dr. Loeffler, an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia, is a respected historian, musicologist, and trained pianist, and has been actively involved in Jewish music for the past decade as a scholar, critic and performer. He served as Pro Musica Hebraica's research director during its first seven years and is now the organization's Resident Scholar.

"I send my warmest congratulations to Dr. Loeffler for receiving this prestigious fellowship, which will contribute to our greater understanding of the many contributions of the Jewish people," Norton said. "As a fighter for human rights my entire life, I very much look forward to Dr. Loeffler's research and his new book."

A native of Washington, D.C., Dr. Loeffler was educated at Harvard College (A.B. 1996), the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Dorot Foundation Fellow), and Columbia University (M.A. 2000 and Ph.D. 2006 in history). In 2003 and 2004, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia and Ukraine to document the history of Jewish music in the former Soviet Union. Dr. Loeffler's research has also been supported by grants from the Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellowship, the Center for Jewish History and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

For more information about fellowship opportunities at the Library of Congress, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.