Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank Jacob Frank — born Jakub Lejbowicz in Podolia in 1726, then a province of Poland and now part of Ukraine — was the son of Leib Buchbinder and Rachel Hirschl. Through his father he inherited a link to the scandal‑ridden Sabbateans, the heterodox Jewish movement that continued to uphold the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth‑century Ottoman rabbi, Kabbalist, and apostate whose doctrine of redemption

All Things Are Possible: A Brief Biography of Lev Shestov In 1936, two years before his death, the Jewish‑Russian philosopher Lev Shestov was invited by the Histadrut to deliver a series of lectures in Eretz Israel. He was warmly received by audiences in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem — the city that, in his late thought, came to symbolise the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of rational necessity. And yet, despite the intensity of that reception, Shestov and his