A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat. On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values. In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.

Our era is profoundly marked by the phenomenon of exile and it is has become increasingly urgent to rethink the concept of exile and our stance towards it. This renewed reflection on the problem of exile brings to the fore a number of questions regarding the traditionally negative connotation of exile. Is there not another way to understand the condition of exile? Permeated with references to the 'stranger', the 'other' and 'exteriority', the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas signifies a positive understanding of exile. This original and compelling book distills from Levinas's philosophy a wisdom of exile, for the first time shedding a positive light on the condition of exile itself. Abi Doukhan argues that Levinas's philosophy can be understood as a comprehensive philosophy of exile, from his ethics to his thoughts on society, love, knowledge, spirituality and art, thereby presenting a comprehensive view of the philosophy of Levinas himself as well as a renewed understanding of the wealth and contribution of exile to a given society.

In the Second-Temple period non-Jews were attracted to Judaism's communal life, religious observance and theological imagination. On the Jewish side, this was matched by the development of several discrete "patterns of universalism"-ways in which Jews were able to conceive of a positive place for Gentiles within their symbolic world. In this book Terence Donaldson collects and comments on all of the texts (to the end of the second Jewish rebellion in 135 CE) that deal with Gentile sympathizers, proselytes, ethical monotheists and participants in end-time redemption. In impressive detail, Donaldson identifies, defines, and describes these "patterns of universalism."