What can you tell us about Jewish Encounters, the book series that Nextbook has launched with Random House?
The series is edited by Jonathan Rosen, who makes brilliant matches between great contemporary writers and subjects in Jewish life and history. The imprint is Schocken, the traditional standard-bearer of high-quality Jewish fiction and nonfiction. It was the publishing house of Kafka. We just published Emma Lazarus. This book is an encounter between Emma and Esther Schor, a Princeton University professor and a poet. Emma was this iconoclastic feminist before there was feminism; a Zionist before there was Zionism; a brilliant poet. What she is known for is the famous poem on the Statue of Liberty, but her life embodied much of what contemporary Jewish women confront every day. She was a very assertive, “pushy” Jewish woman and deals with conflicts such as marriage versus career and Jewish identity versus the secular life. Other books in the series include Maimonides, by Sherwin B. Nuland, an eminent physician and medical historian. Robert Pinsky, the [former U.S.] poet laureate, wrote a
