
Inspired by the enormous hunger for books on Jewish subjects written in a lively, intelligent, and popular manner,
Jewish Encounters brings together writers of the first rank with people and ideas and events from the Jewish past. The series, under the general editorship of Jonathan Rosen, is a collaboration between Nextbook, devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, and Schocken, with its storied backlist of Jewish classics.
Jewish Encounters will include biographies of major figures from Moses to Emma Lazarus to Marc Chagall. It will also examine subjects ranging from Jews and power to messianism. Idiosyncratic and ambitious, these books will explore ideas and themes that have been integral to Jewish life and culture through the ages, and that in many cases lie at the heart of not only American society but Western civilization itself. Our aim is to create books that are at once edifying, entertaining, and wonderfully illuminating.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Jonathan Rosen is the author of the novel
Eve's Apple; The Talmud and the Internet; A journey Between Worlds; and a new novel,
Joy Comes in the Morning (September 2004). In 1990, Jonathan created the Arts & Letters section of the
Forward, which he oversaw for ten years.
Jonathan studied English literature as an undergraduate at Yale and as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. His essays have appeared in
The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, the American Scholar, and several anthologies.