Shai Afsai resides in Providence, Rhode Island. His fiction, essays, scholarly articles, and photographs have appeared in Anthropology Today, The Jerusalem Post, Journal of the American Revolution, Haaretz, Heredom: The Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society, Reading Religion, Reform Jewish Quarterly, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Tablet Magazine, and Underground Voices. His recent research has focused on Zionist historiography, religious traditions of the Beta Yisrael Jewish community from Ethiopia, Judaism in Nigeria, Benjamin Franklin in Jewish thought, aliyah to Israel from Rhode Island, Jewish pilgrimage to Ukraine, and Irish Jewry. His short story collection The Cho-Zen (which includes “The Funeral Director”) will be published in 2019.
Shay Aspril was born and resides in Tel Aviv. He studied law at Tel Aviv University, and has worked as an attorney, journalist and editor. His story collection, Soon Winter Will Begin, was published in Israel in 2012 by Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, and won the Ramat-Gan Literary Award for best debut book. His novel, Fist, was published in 2016 by Zmora Bitan Publishers. His third book, The Judge, was recently published by Am Oved Publishers.
Eran Bar-Gil was born in Holon, Israel in 1969. He studied psychology and comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University, and is also a musician. Bar-Gil writes articles and reviews for the Israeli press, and has published collections of short stories, books of poetry and novels. He has spent a few years between Israel and Africa and is working on a literary-musical trilogy whose first part, 1:1, was published in 2005. Bar-Gil has been awarded the Bernstein Prize (2006), the ACUM Prize for fiction three times (2007; 2010; 2017), the Johanna Prenner Prize (2008) for a film script based on his novel, Iron, the ACUM Prize for Poetry (2013) and the Prime Minister's Prize (2014). Saving Neta, a film based on his fourth novel, Iron, was released in 2017.
Antonio Elio Brailovsky (the author) is a writer with a B.A. in Economics. He was a Delegate to the Convention for Drafting the City of Buenos Aires Constitution of 1996, and he was an Ombudsman for the City of Buenos Aires. He has been declared an Outstanding Personality of the City of Buenos Aires. He has served as Associate Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Visiting Professor at numerous universities of Latin America. He has written 50 books on various scientific and literary subjects. He is known as an ecological firebrand and for his research in environmental history. He defines himself as an anarchist and detests all forms of power. He enjoys Baroque music, intelligent conversations, and remote brooks flowing among trees and bushes.
Kim Chernin, Ph.D. is the author of 23 books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, including A Different Kind of Listening, Crossing the Border, The Hungry Self, and My Life as a Boy. In My Mother’s House, the story of four generations of women in her mother’s family, will be published again in 2019. She lives in Point Reyes, California with her life-companion Renate Stendhal and their two dogs. She is nationally recognized as an expert in eating disorders and is also in private practice.
Jacob Dinezon (the author) (1851?-1919) was a leading figure in 19th-century Eastern European Jewish literary circles. He was a successful novelist, friend and mentor to many of the renowned authors of his day, including Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, and a staunch advocate for Yiddish as a literary language. During the First World War, Dinezon turned his attention to social welfare work by helping to found an orphanage and school for children. His debut novel, The Dark Young Man, published in 1877, is considered the first Jewish realistic romance and the first bestselling novel in Yiddish.
Emuna Elon was born in Jerusalem to a family of rabbis and scholars, and was raised in Jerusalem and New York. She teaches Judaism, Hassidism and Hebrew literature, and has served as advisor to the Prime Minister on the status of Israeli women. She also wrote a weekly political column in the mass circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, and later in Israel Hayom. Elon has published essays, short stories, popular children’s books and a number of bestselling novels. Her novel If You Awaken Love was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (2007). Elon received the Book Publishers Association’s Gold Book Prize (2010) for her novel Inscribe My Name, the Aminach Prize for Beyond My Sight (2014) and the Prime Minister's Prize (2015).
Jacob Frommer is a writer living in Hoboken, New Jersey. He is a founding member of the Manhattan Herring Club and is interested in the busy corner where Judaism, observance and tradition meet. Due to his beard, he is often mistaken for a Haredi Jew, an unintended and fruitful confusion. He attended the Ramaz school and University of Maryland, and intends to get a master’s degree in creative writing. He has written for Altar Journal and The Forward, and is honored to be a part of Jewish Fiction .net.
Nicole Hazan was born in London and made aliyah to Israel in 2010. She holds a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from UEA (The University of East Anglia) in the UK and an MA from the Shaindy Rudolf Graduate Programme in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. Hazan is an alumni resident of Vermont Studio Center, where she was awarded a merit based scholarship. She teaches English at Hakfar Hayarok school, where she is the middle school English Literature and Language coordinator. Hazan lives with her husband in Tel Aviv and is working on her first novel.
Jay Jacoby received an B.A. from the University of Cincinnati, an M.A. from Villanova University, and a Ph. D. from the University of Pittsburgh. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he routinely taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Immigrant literature, Jewish American literature, and Literary Responses to the Holocaust. He officially retired as a Professor of English from UNC-Charlotte where he taught for 26 years. He also chaired UNCC’s Departments of English and Visual Arts. He taught for five years as an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and now offers a variety of courses in a lifelong-learning program at UNCA.
Zvi Jagendorf was born in Vienna in 1936 and left in a hurry in 1939 for England with his parents. He was educated in England, achieving an English Literature degree at Oxford. He left for Israel in 1958 for a position at the Hebrew University where he got his doctorate, taught in the English Department, and became a founder of the Theatre Arts Department. During his early years at the university he was also a radio journalist and a theatre critic for the Jerusalem Post. Much of this time he was acting in semi-professional and professional theatre, street theatre, and university productions. His first novel Wolfy and the Strudelbakers (2001, Dewi Lewis) was placed on the Booker longlist, and his second novel Coming Soon: The Flood (Halban) was published in October 2018.
Birte Kont (the author) is the former chief editor of the Danish Jewish Community’s monthly magazine, as well as a writer and woman of letters. Using her Master’s thesis on Franz Kafka as her point of departure, she wrote Kafka’s Guilt Identity: a Modern Jewish Skeptic Wrestles with the Law, which was published in 2002, and she received a work grant in 2000 and in 2003 from the Danish Arts Council for cultural essay writing. She has participated in, among other things, the Kafka’s Matliary Festival in 2008 in Slovakia, where she gave lectures, as well as in the Kafka Marathon in LiteraturHaus in Copenhagen in 2009. She debuted as a fiction writer in 2011 with the novel En by i Rusland (A Place Nowhere), and in 2012 received a work grant from the Danish Arts Council for fiction writing. The novel was re-published in 2015 as an e-book. She is a member of the board for Fiction Writers in the Danish Writers Guild.
G. Evelyn Lampart is a clinical social worker. She has served clients for the city of New York for decades, with an appreciation for the opportunities to work with people in helpful and positive ways. Presently retired, and with unfettered time, she has participated in a smorgasbord of writing classes, workshops, and conferences. Her work has been published in several print and on line magazines. In the summer of 2017 she attended the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and she was accepted to Bread Loaf in Sicily/September 2018. In addition Evelyn leads an art workshop in a mental health clinic. In that capacity she is able to express three of her facets: social worker, visual artist, and survivor of psychiatric stays. She is a native New Yorker, and a life-long resident of Brooklyn.
Nancy Lefenfeld has, over the past two decades, conducted research on the subject of humanitarian resistance in France during the Shoah and has spoken and written extensively on the subject. A French translation of her work on the smuggling of Jewish children from France into Switzerland was published under the title Le Sort des Autres: Le sauvetage des enfants juifs à la frontière franco-suisse (L’Harmattan, 2016). She authored a chapter in Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, edited by Patrick Henry (The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), and her articles have appeared in The Hidden Child and Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators. This is her first published work of fiction.
Mendele Mokher Seforim (the author) (Mendele the Bookseller in Yiddish ) is the pen name of Shalom Yakov Abramowitz (1835-1917). Although known as the “grandfather of Yiddish Literature”, he is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern fiction in Hebrew as well as Yiddish. In fact, he began his career as a Hebrew writer, later writing in Yiddish as a way to reach a wider audience. In addition to stories that portrayed Jewish shtetl life with honesty and without judgment, Mendele wrote essays and drama in both Hebrew and Yiddish throughout a life spent mostly in Russia.
Harriet Rohmer is the founder and former Publisher of Children’s Book Press, the pioneering publisher of bilingual/multicultural picture books (now an imprint of Lee & Low). Her fiction has appeared in The Distillery, Jewish Women's Literary Annual, Louisiana Literature, The Louisville Review, Lullwater Review, The Orange Coast Review, Pacific Review, Passages North, Red Wheelbarrow, Riverwind, Zeek, Everyday Fiction and Flash Fiction Magazine. Harriet is also the author of Heroes of the Environment (Chronicle Books). “Land of the Last Daddies” is part of a novel in stories called Last of the Refuge Cities, inspired by Harriet’s participation in a Midrash group at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco.
Nelly Shulman is a journalist and writer currently based in Berlin. She is an author of four popular historical novels in the Russian language. he is working on the fifth novel in this series and on her first English-language novel, a historical thriller set during the Siege of Leningrad. She is the recipient of the Finnish Writers Association fellowship and a Hawthornden Fellow. www.nellyshulman.com
