Franz Kafka was an Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature; he wrote in German. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon was an Austro-Hungarian-born Israeli novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon. In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.
Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel. The paper is published in Hebrew and English in the Berliner format, and is also available online. In North America, it is published as a weekly newspaper, combining articles from the Friday edition with a roundup from the rest of the week. Haaretz is Israel's newspaper of record. It is known for its left-wing and liberal stances on domestic and foreign issues.
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Hayim Nahman Bialik was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik is considered a pioneer of modern Hebrew poetry, part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to a new spirit of his time, and recognized today as Israel's national poet. Being a noted essayist and story-teller, Bialik also translated major works from European languages.
Gershom Scholem was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Erich Mendelsohn ; 21 March 1887 – 15 September 1953) was a German-British architect, known for his expressionist architecture in the 1920s, as well as for developing a dynamic functionalism in his projects for department stores and cinemas. Mendelsohn was a pioneer of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architecture, notably with his 1921 Mossehaus design.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was acquired by Random House, and André Schiffrin was hired as executive editor, who continued to publish important works, by both European and American writers, until he was forced to resign in 1990 by Random House owner Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and president Alberto Vitale. Several editors resigned in protest, and multiple Pantheon authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House. In 1998, Bertelsmann purchased Random House, and the imprint has undergone a number of corporate restructurings since then. It is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group under Penguin Random House.
Salman Schocken or Shlomo Zalman Schocken was a German Jewish publisher, and co-founder of the large Kaufhaus Schocken chain of department stores in Germany. Stripped of his citizenship and forced to sell his company by the German government, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, where he purchased the newspaper Haaretz.
Nahum Norbert Glatzer was an Austrian and American scholar of Jewish history and philosophy from antiquity to mid 20th century.
Schocken Department Stores was a chain of department stores in Germany before World War II.
Droemer Knaur is a publishing group based in Munich. The group consists of the book publishers Droemer, Knaur, the Pattloch Publisher and O.W. Barth. Droemer Knaur belongs to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
The Bücherei des Schocken Verlags sometimes informally referred to as beliebte Reihe der Schocken-Bücherei with its distinct, uniform style is widely considered "one of the most important manifestations of the spiritual life of Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1938".
Gershom Gustav Schocken was an Israeli journalist and politician who was editor of Haaretz for more than 50 years and a member of the Knesset for the Progressive Party between 1955 and 1959.
Penguin Random House Limited is a British-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Franz Kafka's life (1883-1924) and connection to Judaism is covered in the main article Franz Kafka. Additional discussion is provided here.
Frederick Ungar Publishing Company was a New York publishing firm which was founded in 1940.
Gideon Schocken was a Haganah fighter, major in the British Army during World War II, and aluf in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He served as the head of the Manpower Directorate from February 1956 to April 1961.
Katherine McNamara is a writer, editor, and digital publisher in Charlottesville, Virginia. She grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. While pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Cornell, she went to Paris on a French-government research fellowship, researching the thought of the French ethnologue Marcel Mauss. From Paris she moved to Alaska, where she lived and wrote for many years; she developed an interest in Native languages and linguistics that continues to this day. She moved to New York in the late 1980s, and in 1989 began writing her 2001 book, Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska. After her husband's death in 1994, she moved to Charlottesville, and soon after began her digital publication Archipelago. Today she is publisher and editor of Artist's Proof Editions.
Yaniv Iczkovits is an Israeli writer known for his novels, essays and philosophical work. His 2015 fantasy-historical adventure novel The Slaughterman's Daughter, with an unlikely assortment of Jewish characters on a quest in late 19th century Czarist Russia, has been translated into several European languages and gained critical acclaim.
