Anne Corey is a writer, artist, poet and teacher, with a Ph.D in Educational Theatre from New York University. Her stories, poems and critical writing have been published in Poetica Magazine: Contemporary Jewish Writing, Bubbe Meisehs by Shayneh Maidelehs, Sinister Wisdom, reviewingtheevidence.com, and other online and print venues. “Leaving Home” is part of Corey’s novel in progress, Anyuta’s Journeys, a series of interrelated stories based on the experiences of her maternal grandmother, a Russian-Jewish immigrant living in Coney Island in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Rochelle Distelheim’s work has been published in The North American Review, Nimrod, Other Voices, StoryQuarterly, Salamander, PersimmonTree.org, The Mississippi Valley Review, Descant, Ascent, Confrontation, Press 53 anthology, “Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.” She was awarded The Katharine Anne Porter Prize and The Salamander Second Prize, she was a Finalist in the Glimmer Train Emerging Writers and Press 53 Open Awards, in the Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and Fellowships, and she was nominated for The Best American Short Stories, 2013 and The Pushcart Press Prize, 2015.
Jean Ende is a former reporter for New York and New Jersey daily newspapers, publicist for New York City politicians, bank marketing executive and college professor. Her work has appeared in Crain’s New York Business, Working Woman Magazine, University of California Press and The Jewish Literary Review and received honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s 2014 Short Story competition. She is a graduate of the City College of New York and Columbia University Graduate School of Business and studied fiction at the Stonybrook University MFA program and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Jean is currently working on a collection of linked humorous short stories about three generations of a Jewish family who settle in the Bronx, NY after fleeing the Holocaust.
Raima Evan has an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in Calyx, Philadelphia Stories, and Fifth Wednesday Journal, and her creative nonfiction in Women & Performance and Referential Magazine. Her one-act play was produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville and published in Dramatics Magazine. She is an assistant dean at Bryn Mawr College.
Mitch Ginsburg, a reporter on leave from The Times of Israel and a fiction editor at The Ilanot Review, has translated several works of fiction, including Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua and The World of the End by Ophir Touche Gafla. He is at work on a novel, from which this is excerpted.
Mary Glickman was born on the South Shore of Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at the Université de Lyon and Boston University. While she was raised in a strict Irish-Polish Catholic family, from an early age Glickman felt an affinity toward Judaism and converted to the faith in her late twenties. She now lives in Seabrook Island, South Carolina, with her husband, Stephen. Glickman is the author of Home in the Morning; One more River, a National Jewish Book Award finalist in Fiction, and Marching to Zion. An Undisturbed Peace is her fourth novel.
Lester Gorn, a native of Portland, Maine, taught for many years (story lab, world literature) at University of California Extension, Monterey Peninsula College and The San Francisco Black Writers Workshop. He’s the co-author of The Art of the Traditional Short Story, a story collection. In the olden days, he served as book editor and daily columnist of the San Francisco Examiner. He’s a combat veteran of World War II. His novel, The Anglo Saxons, was based on his experiences as the only American C.O. in the Israeli Army during the War for Independence (1948-49). Under the nom de guerre Ben Zion Hagai, he commanded the 4th Troop (Anti-Tank), which participated in every major battle of the Negev campaign.
Nora Gold is a prize-winning author and the editor of Jewish Fiction .net. Her novel Fields of Exile won the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award and received widespread acclaim, including from Cynthia Ozick. Gold’s first book, Marrow and Other Stories, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award (1999), and the title story was praised by Alice Munro. Dr. Gold is the Writer-in-Residence and an Associate Scholar at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, where she coordinates the Wonderful Women Writers Series. She is also a co-founder of three Canadian Zionist organizations and holds both Canadian and Israeli citizenship. www.noragold.com
Jeffrey M. Green is the proud father of three responsible adults, who are engaged in their lives and the parents of six grandchildren. Jeffrey Green was raised in Greenwich Village and attended progressive schools, then Princeton and Harvard. Influenced by Havurat Shalom, he moved to Israel with his wife in 1973, became a translator, and has translated Aharon Appelfeld and other major Hebrew writers. He has published articles, short stories, poems, and books, and he is also an amateur musician and ceramicist. He attended Elul, the open Beit Midrash, for seven years. He is as alienated politically in Israel as he was in the U.S. during the Vietnam War.
Alan Kaufman, an American-Israeli and member of PEN American, is author of the novel Matches (Little, Brown) and the memoirs Jew Boy (FSG Fromm) and Drunken Angel (Viva Editions). He is the editor of four anthologies: The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (co-edited with Barney Rosset), The Outlaw Bible of American Essays (all from Basic Books/ Perseus) and The New Generation: Fiction for Our Time From America's Writing Programs (Doubleday). A 2015-16 New York Public Library Affiliated Scholar of the 42nd Street main branch, he is working on his next book.
Shula Kopf lives in Tel Aviv and is a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Report. When she lived in the U.S., she was a staff writer for The Miami Herald and freelanced for Moment Magazine, The Washington Post, and other publications. Kopf has traveled for two years around the world but finds Israel to be the only place where she truly feels at home.
Yeshayahu Koren was born in Kfar Saba, Israel, in 1940, and currently lives in Zichron Ya'akov. He studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and began publishing short stories in the early 1960s. Koren has published collections of stories and novellas, and a novel. He was awarded the Bialik Prize (2008) and the Brenner Prize (2013) for Two Palms and a Word.
Aaron Kreuter currently resides in Toronto, where he spends his time writing, paddling and pursuing a Ph.D in English literature at York University. He has had work published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2014, Vallum, Carte Blanche, FreeFall Magazine and SubTerrain, among other places. Arguments for Lawn Chairs, his first full-length book of poems, will be released by Guernica Editions in 2016.
Mia Martos (a pseudonym) is a Jewish writer living in Israel specializing in women's stories.
Jay Neugeboren is the author of 22 books, including five prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, 1940, etc.), two prize-winning books of nonfiction (Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and four collections of award-winning stories. His stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Hadassah, and have been reprinted in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. Professor and writer-in-residence for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mr. Neugeboren has taught at other universities, including Stanford, Indiana, S.U.N.Y. Old Westbury, and Freiburg (Germany). He lives in New York City, where he teaches in the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts.
Harold Pupko is a physician and medical educator. His previous works of Jewish fiction have appeared in the Canadian Jewish News Annual Passover Literary Supplement, the Potzker Taleswebsite http://potzker.blogspot.ca/, and most often, in the recycling bin of his home office. He lives and works in Toronto.
Bernie Schein, born, bred and bar mitzvah’ed in Beaufort, SC., graduated Newberry College, then earned his Master’s Degree from Harvard University. Bernie’s been featured and published in Atlanta Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek and other magazines, journals, and periodicals. His most recent books are Famous All Over Town (2014) and If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom (2009). Presently, he writes, speaks and tells stories about his life as a Jewish-southerner. An educator for 45 years, he is also an educational consultant, doing workshops, giving talks and telling stories. Bernie and wife Martha are parents and grandparents and live in Beaufort, SC.
Asaf Schurr was born in Jerusalem in 1976 and has a BA in philosophy and theater from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has worked on the editorial staff of the magazine Kahn for human and animal rights and environmental issues, and as editor for the culture, art and politics website Maarav. At present he is a translator and writes literary reviews for the Hebrew press. Schurr has received the Bernstein Prize (2007), the Minister of Culture Prize (2007) for Amram, and the Prime Minister's Prize (2009). His second novel, Motti, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize (USA, 2013).
Naomi Shepherd is the author of eight books published in the UK and US. Born and educated in the UK, she spent 45 years in Israel working first in the Hebrew University and then as political correspondent for leading UK and US newspapers. Her biography of Wilfrid Israel won the UK Wingate Prize. Others include studies of l9th century visitors to Palestine and the British Mandate, a history of Jewish women radicals, the administration and life of Jerusalem, Russian immigrants to Israel, a memoir, and one collection of short stories. “Local Currency” is the title story of a new collection for which she is looking for a publisher. She currently lives in London.
Yaacov Dovid Shulman is a writer, translator and editor, with a particular interest in the writings of Rav Kook (see ravkook.net) and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (see shulman-writer.com). His poems and songs are posted at dotletterword.com. He wrote “The Marvelous Revival of Rabbi Barton” about 25 years ago in a fiction workshop at Poets & Writers in Manhattan. It is his first published piece of adult fiction, and he is glad to see it seeing the light of day.
Peter Sichrovsky is an Austrian journalist, author, and former politician. He was a foreign correspondent between 1986-1996 for publications including Stern Magazine, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and Profil. In 1989 he co-founded Austria's liberal newspaper Der Standard, where he served on the editorial board for several years, and from 1996-2004 was a member of the European Parliament. He is the author of eighteen books, including many acclaimed books based on interviews: Strangers in Their Own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today; Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families (adapted into over fifteen foreign-language theatrical works); Incurably German – interviews with German neo-Nazis; and Abraham's Children: Israel’s Young Generation.
Tom Teicholz is an award-winning journalist who is a contributor to Forbes.com and whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Interview and The Forward.
Nina Vida's writing career began when her children went off to college and she enrolled in the University Without Walls program at California State University Dominguez Hills to pursue a long-deferred degree in English. She wrote a story for her creative writing class, and the professor said she thought Nina had the makings of a writer and should try her hand at a novel. Since then Nina has had seven novels published. She is a native Californian, and lives with her husband Marvin in Huntington Beach, California. They have two grown children.
Warren Warsaw is a New Jersey-bred, Virginia-based author and English teacher. After 20 years of freelancing for numerous newspapers (Washington Post; Virginian-Pilot) he dove fully into his real love—writing short fiction. For a Jersey Jew living in the American South his whole adult life, writing about things Jewish helps sustain self-identity. “Delivery in Montmartre” is his most recent story, and his second published work of fiction.
Zadok Zemach, born in Tel Aviv in 1967, graduated with a BA in geology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then studied theater at Tel Aviv University, writing and direction at the Kibbutzim College, and scriptwriting at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School. He works as performance manager for the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. Zemach won the Bernstein Prize, 1999, for his play Cracks in the Concrete, which was staged by the Habima National Theater in 2007. His second play, Screwed, was awarded a special prize at the Beit Lessin Theater’s Open Stage Festival in 2007; it was staged in 2011 by the Toma Caragiu Theater in Romania and in 2013 by the Haifa Theater, which also staged a children’s play of his one year later. Zemach is currently writing a script for a feature film. The Last Painting of Jacopo Massini, his first fiction book, was awarded the Ramat Gan Prize for Debut Literature (2015) and the Wiener Prize for Debut Fiction (2015).
