ABSTRACT
By the time I started working on this book, my co-author, Abraham (Abe) Kaplan, sadly, was no longer alive. I would not be given the great privilege and opportunity of collaborating with him one more time during his lifetime. This book is therefore a tribute to Abe, a great teacher, a colleague and a treasured friend. The first time I saw Abe Kaplan, he was sitting on the desk, in the classroom at my university (University of Haifa, Israel, in 1972). I was then a fresh graduate student and he was the new professor who had just arrived from the United States crowned with the Time magazine’s title of “One of the top ten professors in the USA.”1 We entered the class and he was there, sitting on the desk, his long legs in purple pants folded under him, wearing golden chains under his long white beard. He started teaching us in what he believed was Hebrew but was in fact a mixture of Yiddish, English and some Biblical Hebrew. His lectures in the course “Methods of Social Inquiry” were thoroughly unstructured and freefloating, following Abe’s mind, current events and students’ questions. While he lost some of the students, others including me were mesmerized by the richness of his knowledge, by the breadth of his intellectual sources and by his brilliance. Some years later I joined his department at the university, I became his colleague and then neighbor and friend. And then, suddenly, this great man passed away. Some years after his death, his wife, Iona, knocked on our door. Dr. Iona Kaplan, a child psychologist, lived with us in the same apartment building on the slope of Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel, overlooking the blue Mediterranean. She came to us at night, carrying a pile of yellowish papers, printed on an old typewriter. “These are some texts Abe wrote,” she said, “I think you might find them interesting since they deal with terrorism.” The texts were Abe at his best. Drawing from so many intellectual sources, combining so many disciplines, bridging art and politics, terrorism and philosophy, violence and ethics – it was the unique, ingenious and inspiring way of Kaplan. I worked on the text for over two years. It needed updating, referencing, checking citations, adding material and more. Very often I found myself trying to “think like Abe,” guessing what he meant in a broken sentence or in a missing paragraph. And then I added some of my own work, omitted some outdated texts and inserted new material, trying all the time to consult with my late co-author.
