For nearly half a century, until his death in October 1948, Judah Magnes occupied a singular place in Jewish public life. He won fame early as a preacher and communal leader, but abandoned these pursuits at the height of his influence for the roles of political dissenter and moral gadfly. During World War I he became an outspoken pacifist and supporter of radical causes. Settling permanently in Palestine in 1922, he was a founder and the first president of the Hebrew University.

Increasingly, he viewed rapprochement with the Arabs as the practical and moral test of Zionism, and the formation of a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews became his chief political goal. His life interests thus focused on the core issues that confronted and still confront the Jewish people: group survival in democratic America, the direction and character of the return to Zion, and thereconciliation of universal ideals with Jewish aspirations and needs.

Dissenter in Zion draws upon a rich corpus of private letters, personal journals, and diaries to offer a moving account of an eloquent and sensitive person grappling with the great questions of the day and of an activist striving to translate private moral feelings into public deeds through politics and diplomacy. We see Magnes disagreeing with Brandeis over the leadership and direction of American Zionism and with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion over ways to achieve peaceful relations with the Arabs; defending himself against charges by Einstein that he was mismanaging the affairs of the Hebrew University; and persistently negotiating with Arab leaders, trying to reach a compromise on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.

Dissenter in Zion also contains a biographical essay on Magnes by Arthur Goren, assessing his ideas and motives and placing him in the context of his times. It shows Magnes's profundity without covering up his weaknesses, his lifelong tactic for courting repeated defeat in favor of long-term goals that could not come to pass in his lifetime.

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier, a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings, a preacher and exegete, a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities, Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. This book, the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years, depicts his life in three cultural milieus—Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy—and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. Yet, it is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity.

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities

Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

Winner of the 2019 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry

Zachary Asher’s second collection, gone bird in the glass hours, is a play in verse, featuring seven voices. It begins with a rabbi, bewildered and bent by personal grief, guided and beguiled by elusive Blue Postman into the world of “the glass hours” and its inhabitants.

Rooted in magical realism, gone bird in the glass hours experiments with multiple forms from epistles to centos, from fractals to prayers. These poems are brave in their excavations of grief and solace, wonder and rage, collective trauma and, ultimately, transcendence. 

This study of the sometimes stormy career of a brilliant and colorful talmudist offers a broad picture of medieval Hispano-Jewish culture.

Meir Abulafia (ca. 1165-1244), commonly called Ramah, was born into the old Jewish aristocracy of Muslim Spain and educated in the best Judeo-Arabic tradition, but lived his whole life under the new political and cultural realities of Christian Spain. Mr. Septimus portrays Ramah's career as a lawyer, exegete, poet, and theologian in an age of rapid cultural change. His book describes the intellectual cross-fertilization and conflict that resulted from new connections with European Jewish communities to the north. It focuses, in particular, on the great controversy over the philosophical rationalism of Maimonides, which Ramah initiated and in which he played a major role. This clash dominated Jewish intellectual history for three centuries and parallels important developments in Latin Christendom.

In September 1930, the New York Times published a list of the clergy whom Rabbi Stephen Wise considered "the ten foremost religious leaders in this country." The list included nine Christians and Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas. Little-known today, Henry Cohen was a rabbi to be reckoned with, a man Woodrow Wilson called "the foremost citizen of Texas" who also impressed the likes of William Howard Taft and Clarence Darrow. Cohen's fleeting fame, however, was built not on powerful friendships but on a lifetime of service to needy Jews—as well as gentiles—in London, South Africa, Jamaica, and, for the last sixty-four years of his life, Galveston, Texas.

More than 10,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, arrived in Galveston in the early twentieth century. Rabbi Cohen greeted many of the new arrivals in Yiddish, then helped them find jobs through a network that extended throughout the Southwest and Midwest United States. The "Galveston Movement," along with Cohen's pioneering work reforming Texas prisons and fighting the Ku Klux Klan, made the rabbi a legend in his time. As this portrait shows, however, he was also a lovable mensch to his grandson. Rabbi Henry Cohen II reminisces about his grandfather's jokes while placing the legendary rabbi in historical context, creating the best picture yet of this important Texan, a man perhaps best summarized by Rabbi Wise in the New York Times as "a soul who touches and kindles souls."