Maimonides: A Biography

Heschel received his doctorate at the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin but was deported to Poland by the Nazis in 1938. He went to London in 1940 and after the war accepted a professorship in ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Heschel articulated a depth theology, arguing that the divine-human encounter takes place at a deeper level than is attainable by the rational mind. Reaching out to skeptical Jews and seeking to make Judaism accessible and meaningful in the modern world, Heschel stressed the interdependence of God and humanity, and maintained that God recognizes and supports ethical human action and that humans express their faith through their actions. Heschel lived according to his word and played an active role in social change, including the civil rights movement. Joachim Neugroschel was a well known literary translator (he translated French, German, Italian, Russian, Yiddish, and German). He also published poetry and was a poetry magazine founder. Neugroschel was born in Vienna on January 13, 1938. He grew up in New York City and graduated from Bronx Science in 1954, and Columbia University in 1958 with a degree in English and Comparative Literature. He moved to Europe and returned to New York six years later where he became a literary translator. Neugroschel was the winner of three PEN Translation Awards, the 1994 French-American Translation Prize, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in German Literature (1998). Neugroschel died on May 23, 2011 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 73.