?? the result you posted had no latex markup at all

(and does have a couple of strange characters (octal 226, decimal 150)
just after each page number, is that intended to be a dash of some
sort?

It displays fine in my mail program as an en-dash.  I don't intend to
deal with tex-escaping and such; just utf-8.

something like

   <xsl:template match="xhtml:span" mode="output-latex">
     <xsl:variable name="c" select="tokenize(@class, ' +')">

         <xsl:if test="$c='italic'">\textit{</xsl:if>
         <xsl:if test="$c='bold'">\textbf{</xsl:if>

<xsl:apply-templates/>

         <xsl:if test="$c='italic'">}</xsl:if>
         <xsl:if test=".='bold'">}</xsl:if>
 </xsl:template>

David, you have background in TeX.  Do you have any thoughts about the
best design approach to this intermediate (xhtml) representation to
make output transformation to other targets easiest?

2)  Split presentation from semantics, and embed the former in the
element; like:

	<span class="title" style="font-weight: bold; font-style:
italic;">Riots and Pogroms</span>

The latter approach would require some rethinking of the code.  Current
templates look like:

   <xsl:template match="mods:titleInfo[not(@type='abbreviated')]"
mode="full">
     <xsl:param name="prefix" />
     <xsl:param name="suffix" />
     <xsl:param name="font-style" />
     <xsl:param name="font-weight" />
     <xsl:value-of select="$prefix" />
     <xsl:choose>
       <xsl:when test="../../bib:refclass='part-inSerial' and
not(../../mods:name)" />
       <xsl:otherwise>
         <span class="title {$font-style} {$font-weight}">
           <xsl:apply-templates select="mods:title" />
           <xsl:apply-templates select="mods:subTitle" />
         </span>
         <xsl:value-of select="$suffix" />
       </xsl:otherwise>
     </xsl:choose>
   </xsl:template>

Incidentally, I'm realizing that XSLT 2.0's unparsed-text() functions
and reg-exp support means that this could theoretically be extended to
handle TeX input documents.