Hillel Halkin was born in New York City in 1939. In 1970 he and his wife made aliya to Israel, settling in Zichron Yaakov. He has translated some seventy works of modern Hebrew fiction into English, among them classics by such
authors as Agnon, Brenner, and Amos Oz. Halkin has also written weekly columns for the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun, and the Jerusalem Review. Hailed by McGill professor Gil Troy as a great contemporary Zionist thinker, Halkin has authored five other books in addition to Letters To An American Jewish Friend (1977): Across The Sabbath River (Houghton-Mifflin, 2002); A Strange Death (Public Affairs, 2005); Yehuda Halevi (Schocken Jewish Encounter Series, 2010); Melisande! What Are Dreams? (Granta, 2013); and a biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky (expected 2014, Yale University Press).