It has been almost four decades since the dominant biography of Martin Buber, Maurice Friedman's three-volume Martin Buber's Life and Work, totaling over thirteen hundred pages, appeared. Readers of this journal will wonder whether Mendes-Flohr's biography of Buber has qualities that make it deserving of recommendation to students over and above its comparatively short length. It certainly does, and Mendes-Flohr has written a biography that fits many of the needs of our academic age. That being said, some readers will wish for more, and there are hints that they could have gotten it.

The relative brevity of Mendes-Flohr's biography, given Buber's extensive list of publications and activities, is not because of omissions. It covers what the knowledgeable reader would expect: the upheaval of Buber's childhood represented by his mother's having left his father (leading Buber to live with his grandparents until he was a teenager); his becoming a fan of Nietzsche and Simmel as a university student; his youthful Zionist activism; his intellectual turn “from mysticism to dialogue,” about which Mendes-Flohr has written previously; the influence of Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig on Buber's thinking; his emigration to Palestine in 1938; his support of a binational state in Palestine; and the various intellectual and personal relationships that made Buber one of the most important (if to some, also one of the most controversial) Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century.

In addition to its comprehensiveness, the volume is exceptionally readable. Most refreshingly, Mendes-Flohr grounds his storytelling in Buber's life and its passions at as many steps as possible. On occasion, the thematic focus of various chapters means that Mendes-Flohr does not narrate Buber's life in a linear fashion, but this is a minor cavil. Somewhat more seriously, the biography does not go into the depth that one might hope. For example, Mendes-Flohr limits his account of Buber's 1923 classic I and Thou to a few paragraphs covering not much more than two pages. Nevertheless, this too does not amount to a serious problem. Mendes-Flohr takes care to tell more, and more interesting, stories about Buber. To return to I and Thou, Mendes-Flohr's focus on its poetic qualities allows the reader to get a taste of Buber's influence on Jorge Luis Borges, which is sadly underanalyzed in Anglophone scholarship on Buber.

It seems to me that there are three emphases in Mendes-Flohr's biography that might make it a better biography than Friedman's, not just because of its brevity. First, Mendes-Flohr regularly brings the narrative back to Buber's wife Paula, not just as an object of desire during their courtship (which is Friedman's focus), but as a novelist and a wise thinker in her own right, as well as an influence on her husband throughout their marriage. Second, the biography bears the fruit of recent research on Buber. Most notable in this case is the penultimate chapter, which spends significant time on the relationship between Buber and Martin Heidegger, focusing on their meeting in May 1957 at a castle near Lake Konstanz. (Readers with further interest should consult Mendes-Flohr's own article on this topic in a 2014 issue of Journal of Religion.) Lastly, although A Life of Faith and Dissent is a biography, it is also perhaps the clearest one-volume treatment of Buber's relationship to the Zionist idea throughout his lifetime. Mendes-Flohr gives a full treatment of what he persuasively describes as “Buber's own ambivalence about the Zionist project.” It is certainly a contribution at the level of Buber's thoughts about Zionism and Arab-Jewish relations. Sometimes the nature of the contribution is surprising. On occasion, discussion among intellectuals of Buber and Arab-Jewish relationships raises the point that in 1942 (Mendes-Flohr claims it was 1944), Nabiha Said, the aunt of Edward Said, evicted Buber from two apartment units in a house in the Talbiya neighborhood in Jerusalem (one unit housed Buber's library). Mendes-Flohr dissipates the drama of this scene by pointing out that Nazi officials had limited Buber's access to his sizable inheritance from his grandfather shortly after having signed the lease in 1937; as a result, Buber likely would not have been able to afford the apartments at the time of his eviction.

Simply by seeing what Mendes-Flohr chooses to include in his biography, students (whether undergraduate or graduate) will be inspired to follow various paths of thought in their own work; at its best, A Life of Faith and Dissent is a call for a field of Buber studies to concretize itself in ways that are less about numinous encounters and more about the give-and-take of the relational stuff of life. Nevertheless, it is the case that the readers of A Life of Faith and Dissent who will profit the most from the book are those who are already committed to the belief that Buber should remain important in contemporary discussions of Jewishness and Judaism. Buber's value is taken for granted, yet neither scholars nor the editors of Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series, in which Mendes-Flohr's biography appears, should assume that student and nonacademic readers share their sense of Buber's value. If Buber is to be more than just a twentieth-century curio, then scholars will have to argue for that status, even in a biography.

Mendes-Flohr has certainly done this in his past scholarship on Buber. The acknowledgments to his biography mention that the original manuscript he submitted to Yale University Press “considerably exceeded the length specified in the contract.” One wonders what is missing, whether A Life of Faith and Dissent might have had even more excellence and transformative power than it does in the truncated published form, and whether sales might justify the appearance of an expanded edition in the future.