During the late 1980s and early 1990s the city of San Francisco waged a war against the homeless. Over 1,000 arrests and citations where handed out by the police to activists for simply distributing free food in public parks. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, the book treats the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of homelessness and public space while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics that is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism. In addition to exploring theoretical and political issues related to gentrification, broken-windows policing, and anti-homeless laws, this book provides activists, students and scholars, examples of how anarchist homeless activists in San Francisco resisted these processes.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero hunger.

An examination of the life and work of Alexander McCaul and his impact on Jewish-Christian relations In Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis, David B. Ruderman considers the life and works of prominent evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul (1799-1863), who was sent to Warsaw by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews. He and his family resided there for nearly a decade, which afforded him the opportunity to become a scholar of Hebrew and rabbinic texts. Returning to England, he quickly rose up through the ranks of missionaries to become a leading figure and educator in the organization and eventually a professor of post-biblical studies at Kings College, London. In 1837, McCaul published The Old Paths, a powerful critique of rabbinic Judaism that, once translated into Hebrew and other languages, provoked controversy among Jews and Christians alike. Ruderman first examines McCaul in his complexity as a Hebraist affectionately supportive of Jews while opposing the rabbis. He then focuses his attention on a larger network of his associates, both allies and foes, who interacted with him and his ideas: two converts who came under his influence but eventually broke from him; two evangelical colleagues who challenged his aggressive proselytizing among the Jews; and, lastly, three Jewish thinkers—two well-known scholars from Eastern Europe and a rabbi from Syria—who refuted his charges against the rabbis and constructed their own justifications for Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century. Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis reconstructs a broad transnational conversation between Christians, Jews, and those in between, opening a new vista for understanding Jewish and Christian thought and the entanglements between the two faith communities that persist in the modern era. Extending the geographical and chronological reach of his previous books, Ruderman continues his exploration of the impact of Jewish-Christian relations on Jewish self-reflection and the phenomenon of mingled identities in early modern and modern Europe.

Essays and Reviews is a collection of seven articles that appeared in 1860, sparking a Victorian culture war that lasted for at least a decade. With pieces written by such prominent Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, Baden Powell, and Frederick Temple (later archbishop of Canterbury), the volume engaged the relations between religious faith and current topics of the day in education, the classics, theology, science, history, literature, biblical studies, hermeneutics, philology, politics, and philosophy. Upon publication, the church, the university, the press, the government, and the courts, both ecclesiastical and secular, joined in an intense dispute. The book signaled an intellectual and religious crisis, raised influential issues of free speech, and questioned the authority and control of the Anglican Church in Victorian society. The collection became a best-seller and led to three sensational heresy trials. Although many historians and literary critics have identified Essays and Reviews as a pivotal text of high Victorianism, until now it has been almost inaccessible to modern readers. This first critical edition, edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla, provides extensive annotation to map the various positions on the controversies that the book provoked. The editors place the volume in its complex social context and supply commentary, background materials, composition and publishing history, textual notes, and a broad range of new supporting documents, including material from the trials, manifestos, satires, and contemporary illustrations. Not only does such an annotated critical edition of Essays and Reviews indicate the impact that the volume had on Victorian society; it also sheds light on our own contemporary cultural institutions and controversies.

Controversy, especially religious controversy, was the great spectator sport of Victorian England. This work is a study of the biggest and best of Victorian religious controversies. Essays and Reviews (1860) was a composite volume of seven authors (six of them Anglican clergymen) which brought England its first serious exposure to biblical criticism. It evoked a controversy lasting four years, including articles in newspapers, magazines and reviews, clerical and episcopal censures, a torrent of tracts, pamphlets and sermons, followed by weightier tomes (and reviews of all these), prosecution for heresy in the ecclesiastical courts, appeal to the highest secular court, condemnation by the Convocation of the clergy and a debate in Parliament. Essays and Reviews was the culmination and final act of the Broad Church movement. Outwardly the conflict ended inconclusively; at a deeper level, it marked the exhaustion both of the Broad Church and of Anglican orthodoxy and the commencement of an era of religious doubt. This controversy illustrates the pathology of Victorian religion in its demonstration of the propensity to controvert and the methods of controversialists. It is both the greatest Victorian crisis of faith and the best case study of Victorian religious controversy.