Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to my research assistants, Christoph Hopp and Yuval Lieblich, who invested considerable time and effort in going through the extensive primary sources of the thinkers treated in this volume and helped to prepare the annotations. The final product is much the richer for their efforts.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my copy editor, Dobrochna Fire, for her patience and care in going over my translation draft multiple times to identify passages needing further clarification and helping to achieve consistency of style. Her questions for clarification inspired me to provide explanatory notes that should be enlightening to the general reader of this work. Her extensive background of knowledge in general east-European intellectual history also provided occasion for exchanges that I hope yielded benefit to the advantage this book will provide to readers in this area.
I am thankful to the librarians of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Academy for Jewish Religion for their generosity and patience in extending to me the resources necessary for completion of this project.
I am grateful to Laura Shelley for her usual excellent work in preparing the index to this volume.
I am thankful to Eliezer and Sabina Schweid for hosting me and being generous of their time, knowledge, and friendship to assist the progress of this project. I am thankful to colleagues and students at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, New York and fellow-congregants at Congregation Kol Rina in South Orange, New Jersey for exchanges that have helped me visualize the live audience whom this work is intended to reach. I am most of all grateful to my family, and my wife Margie Freeman, for giving the emotional and personal support that has helped me to see this project through to completion.
Leonard Levin
South Orange, New Jersey
October, 2018