Martin Buber is one of the luminaries of modern Jewish thought, and yet prior to 1944 his work was little known in the Anglophone world as few of his books had been translated into English. In 1933, Buber asked Adolph Oko, the Librarian of the Hebrew Union College (H.U.C.) in Cincinnati, Ohio to help him find a publishers for his work. The correspondence about securing a publisher between Buber and Oko eventually expanded to include the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (then teaching at H.U.C.) and the historian Hans Kohn, a former student of Buber who was now a refugee teaching in the U.S.