Martin Buber aroused passionate, often contradictory opinions, both regarding his personality and his thought. Gershom Schocken, editor of Haaretz , said that one day he was walking with S. Y. Agnon: "We were walking around Talpiot and I asked him what his attitude was towards Buber. Agnon stopped in his walk and said: 'I want to tell you something. There are people about whom you have to decide once: do you love them or do you hate them. I decided to love Buber.'" Buber's philosophical and theological writings, including the famous I and Thou , have contributed greatly to religious and Jewish thought, as well as to biblical studies, political theory, and Zionist thought. In this new biography, Paul Mendes-Flor situates Buber's legacy at the crossroads between the intellectual and cultural life of German Jewry and European life in the first half of the twentieth century. This is the first full biography of the groundbreaking modern Jewish philosopher. The book is organized around several key events in his life, such as his mother suddenly abandoning him when he was three years old—a formative trauma that left Buber with a lasting sense of sensitivity to the fragility of human relationships and the need to nurture them with what he would later call "dialogical attention."

The Hope of Enlightenment presents for the first time in Hebrew a comprehensive analysis of the thought of Jürgen Habermas. A philosopher, social critic, and public intellectual, Habermas is an ardent but hardly a dogmatic defender on the Enlightenment. He has thus has contributed a distinctive perspective in the ongoing discourse on modernity. To illuminate the far-reaching significance of this contribution – and its challenges to both Israeli and modern society in general -- Matan Oram examines Habermas's critical thought through the prism of political philosophy in the broad context of the crisis of modernity. By focusing on the dialectical relationship between 'rationalism' and 'liberalism' in Habermas’s thought, the book traces his theoretical project as it has evolved throughout his vast corpus of writings, and explores its philosophical and intellectual origins.