Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters.

First edition of this exploration of Hasidism, focusing on the tales, legends, and portraits of its 18th and 19th-century masters. Octavo, original publisher's cloth, top stain maroon, cartographic endpapers. Presentation copy, warmly inscribed by the author on the half-title page and signed in English and Hebrew, "For Maurine and Stanley Kessler - in these days of hope, Elie Wiesel." The recipient, Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler (1923–2019), Rabbi Emeritus of Beth El Temple in West Hartford, Connecticut, was a figure of exceptional moral courage and scholarly distinction whose career embodied the activist tradition within mid-twentieth-century American Judaism. Educated at Yeshiva University and ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary — where he studied under the legendary Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — Kessler brought to his nearly four decades of pulpit leadership at Beth El Temple a vision of rabbinic responsibility that extended far beyond congregational life: he rode as a Freedom Rider in 1963, marched alongside Martin Luther King in Birmingham and Selma, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1967 to advocate for persecuted Jewish "Refuseniks," and spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, embodying Heschel's celebrated conception of protest as, in his own words, "praying with one's feet." His public life was preceded by eighteen combat missions as a Liberator bomber pilot over Italy and Austria during the Second World War. Fine in a very good dust jacket. Ownership signature of Stanley M. Kessler to the front free endpaper. Jacket design by Muni Lieblein.