A personal history by the man described in The New Yorker as 'the most influential living philosopher'.'What binds us pushes time away.' So wrote David Oppenheim, classical scholar, collaborator and then critic of Sigmund Freud, friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, participant in and observer of the intellectual and cultual highs and lows of early 20th-century Vienna.Oppenheim's grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, never knew his grandfather, for Oppenheim died as a victim of the Nazis before Singer was born. Fifty years after Oppenheim's death, Singer set out to get to know his grandfather. He found a wealth of written materials, including intimate personal letters, and was startled to read things he had never expected about his grandparents, and their families and friends. Nevertheless, what bound him to his grandfather was a passion for understanding ideas about universal values and human nature that did 'push time away'. Through the unique documents, Singer gives readers a rare glimpse into the controversial circles around Freud and Adler at a time when Vienna had the most vibrant, and also most intensely Jewish, intellectual life in Europe.

In Scattered Among the Peoples, historian Allan Levine presents a vivid and distinctly human perspective on how the Jewish people survived eight hundred years of persecution and forced migration, building and rebuilding their lives and communities. Structured as a chronological series of twelve moment-in-time portraits, focusing on individuals and their interaction with their families and society, the narrative carries readers through the economic, political, social and intellectual climates of some of the world's most famous and fascinating cosmopolitan centers. From the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, to the emigration of Soviet Jews from Russia following the Six Day War in Israel in 1967, Levine's masterful account describes expulsions and scandals, false messiahs and the first ghetto, assassinations, blood libels, the learning and wealth that sprung up in distant cities, and some devastating reversals of fortune. Above all, this compelling saga chronicles the lives of a vibrant cast of characters-well-known historical figures, as well as many who have been forgotten. The successes and the failures of so many-as teachers, rabbis, merchants, writers, soldiers, and physicians-add a colorful and accessible dimension to this sprawling history of the Diaspora. Scattered Among the Peoples is an impressive and immensely readable book, one that is an important contribution to the literature of Jewish history.