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 Divided Passions is a collection of published and unpublished essays and articles by Paul Mendes-Flohr from the past decade.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.

The Father of Jewish Mysticism offers an incisive look at the early life and writings of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the father of modern Jewish mysticism and a major 20th-century Jewish intellectual. Daniel Weidner offers the first full-length study, published in English, of Scholem's thought. Scholem, a historian ofthe Kabbalah and sharp critic of Jewish assimilation, played a major role in the study and popularization of Jewish mysticism. Through his work on the Kabbalah, Scholem turned the closed world of mystical texts into a force for Jewish identity. Skillfully drawing on Scholem's early diaries and writings, The Father of Jewish Mysticism introduces a young, soon-to-be legendary intellectual in search of himself and Judaism.

Coherent Judaism begins by excavating the theologies within the Torah and tracing their careers through the Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Any compelling, contemporary Judaism must cohere as much as possible with traditional Judaism and everything else we believe to be true about our world. The challenge is that over the past two centuries, our understandings of both the Torah and nature have radically changed. Nevertheless, much Jewish wisdom can be translated into a contemporary idiom that both coheres with all that we believe and enriches our lives as individuals and within our communities. Coherent Judaism explains why pre-modern Judaism opted to privilege consensus around Jewish behavior (halakhah) over belief. The stresses of modernity have conspired to reveal the incoherence of that traditional approach. In our post-Darwinian and post-Holocaust world, theology must be able to withstand the challenges of science and history. Traditional Jewish theologies have the resources to meet those challenges. Coherent Judaism concludes by presenting a philosophy of halakhah that is faithful to the covenantal aspiration to live long on the land that the Lord, our God, has given us.

"While a great deal of research has been done about many aspects of the death penalty, very little attention has been paid to the movement organized against it. Coalition Building in the Anti-Death Penalty Movement fills that gap with an empirical examination of the external and internal factors that shape the role race plays in the anti-death penalty movement. While the death rows across the U.S. are overwhelmingly filled with racial minorities and the poor, the ranks of the anti-death penalty movement are dominated by white, middle-class professionals. The attention given to race arise out of this racial distinction between death row inmates and the activists who advocate for them." "By conducting interviews with white, black, and Latino anti-death penalty activists, this book examines the influence of race on the mobilization of activists and their approach toward abolition. The concepts of political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing provided by the political process model, are used to describe the complex manner in which moral opposition to the death penalty is shaped by the racial realities of the activists. Although racial tensions lie just below the surface, they nonetheless create real obstacles for the movement as it strives to build a racially diverse coalition of activists aimed at death penalty abolition." --Book Jacket.

The first full length study of the history of sexuality in America, Intimate Matters offers trenchant insights into the sexual behavior of Americans, from colonial times to today. D'Emilio and Freedman give us a deeper understanding of how sexuality has dramatically influenced politics and culture throughout our history. "The book John D'Emilio co-wrote with Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters, was cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when, writing for a majority of court on July 26, he and his colleagues struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy. The decision was widely hailed as a victory for gay rights—and it derived in part, according to Kennedy's written comments, from the information he gleaned from D'Emilio's book, which traces the history of American perspectives on sexual relationships from the nation's founding through the present day. The justice mentioned Intimate Matters specifically in the court's decision."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune "Fascinating. . . . [D'Emilio and Freedman] marshall their material to chart a gradual but decisive shift in the way Americans have understood sex and its meaning in their lives." —Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review "With comprehensiveness and care . . . D'Emilio and Freedman have surveyed the sexual patterns for an entire nation across four centuries." —Martin Bauml Duberman, Nation "Intimate Matters is comprehensive, meticulous and intelligent." —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World "This book is remarkable. . . . [Intimate Matters] is bound to become the definitive survey of American sexual history for years to come." —Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

What do emotions actually do? Recent work in the history of emotions and its intersections with cultural studies and new materialism has produced groundbreaking revelations around this fundamental question. In Emotional Bodies, contributors pick up these threads of inquiry to propose a much-needed theoretical framework for further study of materiality of emotions, with an emphasis on emotions' performative nature. Drawing on diverse sources and wide-ranging theoretical approaches, they illuminate how various persons and groups—patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds, and humanitarian agencies—perform emotional practices. A section devoted to medical history examines individual bodies while a section on social and political histories studies the emergence of collective bodies. Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, María Rosón, Pilar León-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor.