Results by title

    From the McDonald’s hot coffee case to the cattle ranchers’ beef with Oprah Winfrey, from the old English "Assize of Bread" to current nutrition labeling laws, what we eat and how we eat are shaped as much by legal regulations as by personal taste. Barry M. Levenson, the curator of the world-famous (really!) Mount Horeb Mustard Museum and a self-proclaimed "recovering lawyer," offers in Habeas Codfish an entertaining and expert overview of the frustrating, frightening, and funny intersections of food and the law.
    Discover how Mr. Peanut shaped the law of trademark infringement for the entire food industry. Consider the plight of the restaurant owner besmirched by a journalist’s negative review. Find out how traditional Jewish laws of kashrut ran afoul of the First Amendment. Prison meals, butter vs. margarine, definitions of organic food, undercover ABC reporters at the Food Lion, the Massachusetts Supreme Court case that saved fish chowder, even recipes—it’s all in here, so tuck in!

A collection of rare writings and correspondence by a rabbi and diplomat active at the end of the Ottoman Empire

Rabbi, diplomat, linguist, fixer of delicate problems, Haim Nahum moved through the last years of the Ottoman world and the birth of the modern Middle East with uncommon dexterity. He left behind a rich trove of letters and writing, the best of which are collected in this volume. For contemporary readers, his story feels surprisingly current. He inhabited an age crowded with competing identities, clashing nationalisms, and endless political improvisations. In other words, he would feel perfectly at home today. 

The most intriguing feature of Nahum is not that he occupied important positions, but that he seemed constitutionally incapable of belonging to only one world. Equally at ease among statesmen, clerics, scholars, and bureaucrats, he functioned as a human connecting flight between cultures. In this fascinating biography first edited and published in French in 1990, Esther Benbassa captures this cosmopolitan figure without embalming him in reverence, allowing readers to encounter a subtle, resourceful, and occasionally elusive man whose métier was negotiation and whose natural habitat was complexity. 

This book will delight readers of Ottoman history, Jewish history, Middle Eastern affairs, diplomatic history, biography, religious studies, and Mediterranean culture. It will also appeal to polyglots, antiquarians, devotees of vanished empires, and anyone attracted to those liminal figures who stand at the crossroads of civilizations, translating not merely languages but entire ways of seeing the world.

Eminent contributors consider what Hannah Arendt means in today’s public debates.

Is politics really nothing more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of “simple” truths? No thinker has argued more passionately against this narrow view than Hannah Arendt, and no one has more to say to those who bring questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life. This volume brings leading figures in philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary theory into a dialogue about Arendt’s work and its significance for today’s fractious identity politics, public ethics, and civic life.

In recent years there has been much controversy concerning Martin Heidegger’s politics, prompted by new research on the nature and extent of his engagement with National Socialism. Examining the political ideas embedded in Heidegger’s larger philosophical oeuvre, James F. Ward moves beyond the narrow preoccupation with Heidegger’s overtly pro-Nazi utterances and activities to show how the central theme of Heidegger’s philosophy—the question of Being—is itself inherently political. 

Ward builds his case on close readings of texts drawn from nearly all of the writings published during Heidegger’s lifetime as well as from lectures, course transcripts, and other materials that appeared posthumously. With subtlety and insight, he uncovers the political content of Heidegger’s thinking on such topics as the temporality of Being, the role of science in the crisis of the West, and the presumed special status and destiny of the German people. In an epilogue, Ward reflects on the implications of Heidegger’s political thinking for postmodern political theory.

Powerful and moving, Heroes of Their Own Lives offers an honest understanding of a persistent problem and a realistic view of the difficulties in stopping it.

Hizbu’llah is the largest and most prominent political party in Lebanon, and one of the most renowned Islamist movements in the world. In this book, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb examines the organisation’s understanding of jihad and how this, together with its belief in martyrdom, brought about the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon in May 2000.

Saad-Ghorayeb explores the nature of the party’s struggle against the West by studying its views on the use of violence against Westerners. Crucially, she also addresses the question of whether Hizbu’llah depicts this struggle in purely political or civilisational terms. The existential nature of the movement’s conflict with Israel is analysed and the Islamic roots of its anti-Judaism is unearthed.

The author explores the mechanics and rationale behind the party’s integration into the Lebanese political system, and sheds light on how it has reconciled its national idenitity with its solidarity with the Muslim umma.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age. His panoramic studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stretching from the French Revolution to the fall of Soviet communism, have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. At the same time, his writings on labour movements and socialist politics have occupied a central place in left-wing debates. Despite this, no extended study of Hobsbawm's work has yet been attempted Gregory Elliott fills this gap in exemplary fashion.

Elliott analyses both the scholarly record of Hobsbawm and the intellectual and political journey that his life represents. In doing so, he seeks to situate Hobsbawm's thought within the context of a generalised crisis of confidence on the Left after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rich in content and written in Elliott's authoritative and highly readable style, this book is a must for anyone with an interest in Hobsbawm and the crisis of the Left.

A consideration of what the culture of Hong Kong tells us about the state of the world at the fin-de-siècle.

On June 30, 1997, Hong Kong as we know it will disappear, ceasing its singular and ambiguous existence as a colonial holdover and becoming part of the People’s Republic of China. In an intriguing and provocative exploration of its cinema, architecture, photography, and literature, Ackbar Abbas considers what Hong Kong, with its unique relations to decolonization and disappearance, can teach us about the future of both the colonial city and the global city.

The first global comparative analysis of the role of humanitarianism from below in political and social change.

Drawing on original ethnographic and historical research, Humanitarianism from Below? addresses a wide audience of scholars and students in humanitarian and development studies, anthropology, and political science. Drawing from timely case studies on the war in Ukraine, the Ebola pandemic in West Africa, the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, and the global flows of aid from Arab states to the Persian Gulf, the book considers humanitarianism’s multiple histories and offers a profound reassessment of humanitarian pluralism today. It critically discusses humanitarianism as a historically, politically, and culturally contingent phenomenon that entails unequal relations of power and multiple forms of universalism, as well as issues of dehumanization and inhumanity.