The first full account of the life of one of America's greatest religious thinkers during World War II and in the decades afterward Born in Warsaw, raised in a Hasidic community, and reaching maturity in secular Jewish Vilna and cosmopolitan Berlin, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) escaped Nazism and immigrated to the United States in 1940. This lively and readable book tells the comprehensive story of his life and work in America, his politics and personality, and how he came to influence not only Jewish debate but also wider religious and cultural debates in the postwar decades. A worthy sequel to his widely praised biography of Heschel's early years, Edward Kaplan's new volume draws on previously unseen archives, FBI files, interviews with people who knew Heschel, and analyses of his extensive writings. Kaplan explores Heschel's shy and private side, his spiritual radicalism, and his vehement defense of the Hebrew prophets' ideal of absolute integrity and truth in ethical and political life. Of special interest are Heschel's interfaith activities, including a secret meeting with Pope Paul VI during Vatican II, his commitment to civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., his views on the state of Israel, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. A tireless challenger to spiritual and religious complacency, Heschel stands as a dramatically important witness.

"Baudelaire's Prose Poems" is the first full-length, integral study of the fifty prose poems Baudelaire wrote between 1857 and his death in 1867, collected posthumously under the title "Le Spleen de Paris." Edward Kaplan resurrects this neglected masterpiece by defining the structure and meaning of the entire collection, which Kaplan himself has translated as "The Parisian Prowler." Engaging in a dialogue with deconstructionists whose critical methods often obscure the meaning of the whole, Kaplan rejects the view of prose poems as a random assemblage of melodic rhapsodies. Instead, he sees a coherent ensemble of "fables of modern life" that join lyricism and critical self-awareness.

Kaplan defines three dimensions of experience that inform "The Parisian Prowler" from beginning to end: the esthetic includes art, ideal beauty, and especially the intense immediacy of sensations, fantasy, and dream; the ethical includes principles of right and wrong, relations between intimates or between individuals and the community; and the religious--not to be confused with church or dogma--points to the province of ultimate reality, whether it be God or an absolute standard of truth, justice, and meaning. These dimensions are explored by a narrator, a complex, highly self-conscious writer whose passion for pure Beauty continually frustrates his yearning for affection. He begins his tour through 1850s Paris alienated from reality, becomes aggravated by conflicts between his "ethical" and "esthetic" drives--to the point of despair--and ends by expressing loyal friendship. Analyzing the fables in relation to one another in pairs or groups, Kaplan demonstrates how later pieces intermingle or even confuse the narrator's esthetic and ethical drives, and how the most advanced "theoretical fables"--through ironic puns on their form--further undermine this simplistic dualism.

Baudelaire's fables of modern life radically challenge us to examine our presuppositions, Kaplan argues. Though rarely didactic, the narrator's Socratic irony engages readers in a volatile dialogue, provoking them to form their own judgments. He often betrays self-destructive anger, rebelling against injustice or stupidity--or against women who might love him. At times he insults our complacency and self-deception with vicious glee; at other times, he recognizes his own frailty, nurturing a sense of fellowship with the oppressed. Seeking both to analyze experience objectively and to sympathize with isolated individuals like himself, Baudelaire's narrator joins criticism and poetry in a voyage of self-discovery, finally accepting experience as impure and mixed.

Kaplan contends that the "prose poems" constitute a genre parallel to the poems Baudelaire added to the 1861 edition of "Les Fleurs du Mal," both of which illustrate fundamental principles of the theory of modernity he developed in his essays on art. The self-reflective fables in "The Parisian ProwlerM/i>--depicting a way of thinking beyond ideologies--clarify Baudelaire's development as poet, critic, and thinker.

In this first one-volume English-language full biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward K. Kaplan tells the engrossing, behind-the-scenes story of the life, philosophy, struggles, yearnings, writings, and activism of one of the twentieth century's most outstanding Jewish thinkers. Kaplan takes readers on a soulful journey through the rollercoaster challenges and successes of Heschel's emotional life. As a child he was enveloped in a Hasidic community of Warsaw, then he went on to explore secular Jewish Vilna and cosmopolitan Berlin. He improvised solutions to procure his doctorate in Nazi-dominated Berlin, escaped the Nazis, and secured a rare visa to the United States. He articulated strikingly original interpretations of Jewish ideas. His relationships spanned not only the Jewish denominational spectrum but also Catholic and Protestant faith communities. A militant voice for nonviolent social action, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. (who became a close friend), expressed strong opposition to the Vietnam War (while the FBI compiled a file on him), and helped reverse long-standing antisemitic Catholic Church doctrine on Jews (participating in a secret meeting with Pope Paul VI during Vatican II). From such prodigiously documented stories Heschel himself emerges-mind, heart, and soul. Kaplan elucidates how Heschel remained forever torn between faith and anguish; between love of God and abhorrence of human apathy, moral weakness, and deliberate evil; between the compassion of the Baal Shem Tov of Medzibozh and the Kotzker rebbe's cruel demands for truth. "My heart," Heschel acknowledged, is "in Medzibozh, my mind in Kotzk."

From Edouard Manet to T. S. Eliot to Jim Morrison, the reach of Charles Baudelaire's influence is beyond estimation. In this prize-winning translation of his no-longer-neglected masterpiece, Baudelaire offers a singular view of 1850s Paris. Evoking a melange of reactions, these fifty "fables of modern life" take us on various tours led by a flaneur, an incognito stroller. Through day and night, in gleaming cafes and filthy side streets, this alienated yet compassionate esthete muses on the bizarre in the commonplace, the sublime in the mundane. As the work reveals a teeming metropolis on the eve of great change, we see a Paris as contradictory, surprising, and ultimately unknowable as our guide himself. Superbly complemented by twenty-one period illustrations by Delacroix, Callot, Manet, Whistler, Baudelaire himself, and others, The Parisian Prowler is an essential companion to Les Fleurs du Mal and other works by the father of modern poetry. In the preface to this edition, translator Edward K. Kaplan explains how the volume's illustrations act as a graphic subtext to the narrator's observations.

This book consists of papers presented at a conference organized and chaired by Edward K. Kaplan of Brandeis University, held at Adath Jeshurun Synagogue in Louisville, Kentucky in February 2002, sponsored by the Thomas Merton Foundation, plus additional material, including essays, journal entries, letters, poetry, news reports, and church documents. Some contributors are Jewish, others Christian. The topic is Merton's relation to Jewish friends and correspondents (prominent authors and rabbis) and his leadership in the context of an awakening on the part of the Christian Church to the grievousness of its long persecution and rejection of the Jewish people. The keynote presentation is by James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword, who traces his own awakening under Merton's guidance as typical of his generation. In the middle of the book we have Merton's correspondence with Jewish colleagues and the complete interchange between Merton and Abraham Joshua Heschel during the time when Heschel was an invited observer/adviser at Vatican II. The history of the development of the Council's Declaration on the Jews, Nostra Aetate, is treated in some detail with news reports and other materials and the four versions of the Declaration itself carried in the appendix with analysis and commentary, plus important sequents up to the present time.

Merton is critiqued for too quickly shifting attention from the experience of the Jewish people themselves to the guilt (or otherwise) of the Christians; several papers debate this. Nevertheless he is presented as making a significant opening to reverent appreciation of Judaism past and present as he aspires to be--or claims to be--"a true Jew under myCatholic skin." His characteristically strong feelings are revealed in journal entries and letters and a transcription of a lecture to the Gethsemani monks. He discusses with his Jewish friends topics such as retelling tales, writing and translating poetry, and the spiritual experience of reading the Bible. Several essays deal with Merton and his Jewish parallels as spiritual teachers, prophets, and activists, "heretics of modernity."

The book draws to a close with the renewal issues of pluralism, of which Merton was a forerunner; Hasidism, to which he was attracted and which is becoming popular again now; and a transcription of an interview with Merton's friend Jewish Renewal leader, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.