Divided Passions

Paul Mendes-Flohr is emerging as the leading Jewish intellectual historian of the present generation. In particular, he is responsible for a significant amount of the important and pertinent scholarship in the field of German-Jewish intellectual history. No one else is quite as intimately knowledgeable with this material, the ambiguous legacy of one of the most inventive and poignant episodes of creativity in the life of the Diaspora. Divided Passions is a collection of published and unpublished essays and articles by Paul Mendes-Flohr from the past decade. In a manner that underscores their continued relevance and significance, Mendes-Flohr writes about the problems that Buber, Rosenzweig, Bloch, Simon, Scholem and others tried to crystallize and resolve. Mendes-Flohr moves with effortless authority among the disciplines of theology, philosophy, literature, history, and sociology. Fitted with these interdisciplinary resources, he enriches his treatment of themes and figures in ways that exceed the scope, to say nothing of the execution, found in other literature. The book conveys a rare metaphysical depth, for questions of faith, identity, and Dasein explored by the intellectual figures of the past are also personal ones for the author as well. Mendes-Flohr's exceptional ability to keep this body of work alive and available provides an outstanding source of commentary on the subjects that dominate the agenda of modern Jewish studies.

This richly imagined novel is set against a turbulent backdrop of the First World War, the anti-conscription riots in Quebec, the Roaring Twenties and the onset of the Great Depression. The heroine is the passionate, intelligent Jeanne Langlois, the only child of a powerful Quebec politician and his much younger wife. The story opens as Jeanne, a frail sixteen-year-old, arrives in the winter twilight at a convent in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, more than 2000 kilometres from her home in Montreal. In a vain attempt to please her fanatically devout mother, Jeanne is trying to believe that she feels a religious vocation. But the convent is bitterly cold, there is never enough to eat and the nuns observe that only the stout and robust novices can endure the privations of their religious life, which includes a vow of silence. Jeanne is unable to bear the loneliness or physical hardships, and soon falls seriously ill. Her mother, Madeleine, refuses to send for her, but she is rescued by her beautiful young Aunt Florence, whom Jeanne thinks of ever after as "The Angel." "The Angel" takes her ailing niece into her own house and under her protection, but after Jeanne's return to health, she must return to her parents' oppressive home. Lonely and lost, innocent and ignorant, Jeanne escapes into marriage with Mick O'Neill, a charming Irishman and her father's protege, but marriage is far from being the haven for which she has longed. This is the story of a passionate woman's quest for happiness and maturity in a repressive society, but it is also a portrait of that society in the throes of overwhelming change. La Passion de Jeanne was on the bestseller lists for over three months in Quebec in 1997.

With exacting scholarship and fecund analysis, Manuel Oliveira probes through the lens of Martin Buber (1878-1965) the theological and political ambiguities of Israel’s divine election. These ambiguities became especially pronounced with the emergence of Zionism. Wary, indeed, alarmed by the tendency of some of his fellow Zionists to conflate divine chosenness with nationalism, Buber sought to secure the theological significance of election by both steering Zionism from hypertrophic nationalism and by a sustained program to revalorize what he called alternately “Hebrew Humanism.” As Oliveira demonstrates, Buber viewed the idea of election teleologically, espousing a universal mission of Israel, which effectively calls upon Zionism to align its political and cultural project to universal objectives. Thus, in addressing a Zionist congress, he rhetorically asked, “What then is this spirit of Israel of which you are speaking? It is the spirit of fulfillment. Fulfillment of what? Fulfillment of the simple truth that man has been created for a purpose (...) Our purpose is the upbuilding of peace (...) And that is its spirit, the spirit of Israel (...) the people of Israel was charged to lead the way to righteousness and justice.”

A reinterpretation of thinkers from Benjamin and Rosenzweig to Simone Weil and Derrida Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ‘other’ of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

Romantic love might be one of the most talked-about subjects in the world. Sometimes it can be confusing and hurtful, but other times it can be fulfilling and exciting. Either way, feelings of love are important and need to be carefully considered. New author Timaka Burl takes a bold new approach to her poetry. Exploring those taboo love situations, Timaka Burl knows how it feels to be torn between what is right and wrong. She shares difficult times in her life and how they've influenced her to be a better friend, lover, and person. Make the right decision-fall in love with the truth in Passions of a Divided Soul.

Investigates Plato's account of the tripartite soul, looking at how the theory evolved over the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus.

To understand the Middle East we must also understand how the West produced a temporal narrative of world history in which westemers placed themselves on top and all others below them. In a landmark reinterpretation of Middle Eastern history, this book shows how Arabs, Muslims, Turks, and Jews absorbed, revised, yet remained loyal to this Western vision. Turkish Kemalism and Israeli Zionism, in their efforts to push their people forward, accepted the narrative almost wholeheartedly, eradicating what they perceived as 'archaic' characteristics of their Jewish and Turkish cultures. Arab nationalists negotiated a more culturally schizophrenic approach to appeasing the colonizer's gaze. But so too, Samman argues, did the Islamists who likewise wanted to improve their societies. But in order to modernize, Islamists prescribed the eradication of Western contamination and reintroduced the prophetic stage that they believe - if the colonizer and their local Arab coconspirators hadn't intervened - would have produced true civilization. Samman's account explains why Islamists broke more radically with the colonizer's insult. For all these nationalists gender would be used as the measuring device of how well they did in relation to the colonizer's gaze.

Thinking Jewish Culture in America argues that Jewish thought extends our awareness and deepens the complexity of American Jewish culture. This volume stretches the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish thought so that it can productively engage expanding arenas of culture by drawing Jewish thought into the orbit of cultural studies. The eleven contributors to Thinking Jewish Cultures, together with Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s postscript, position Jewish thought within the dynamics and possibilities of contemporary Jewish culture. These diverse essays in Jewish thought re-imagine cultural space as a public and sometimes contested performance of Jewish identity, and they each seek to re-enliven that space with reflective accounts of cultural meaning. How do Jews imagine themselves as embodied actors in America? Do cultural obligations limit or expand notions of the self? How should we imagine Jewish thought as a cultural performance? What notions of peoplehood might sustain a vibrant Jewish collectivity in a globalized economy? How do programs in Jewish studies work within the academy? These and other questions engage both Jewish thought and culture, opening space for theoretical works to broaden the range of cultural studies, and to deepen our understanding of Jewish cultural dynamics. Thinking Jewish Culture is a work about Jewish cultural identity reflected through literature, visual arts, philosophy, and theology. But it is more than a mere reflection of cultural patterns and choices: the argument pursued throughout Thinking Jewish Culture is that reflective sources help produce the very cultural meanings and performances they purport to analyze.