Hillel halkin biography

Biography.
Hillel Halkin is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist who has lived in Israel since 1970.
Hillel Halkin was born in New York City in 1939.

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Interview with Hillel Halkin

Hillel Halkin at his Zichron Yaakov home. Photo: Lucille Cohen

At high school Halkin found he had both "a very Jewish side and a very American side" and muses, "I was never able to reconcile the Jewish and the American sides - to integrate them - and certainly not by living in America." So who is Halkin? The character Hoo (or should it be "Who?") is, he reveals, perhaps a projection of that side of the author, further explaining a tension that appears to be the source of his personal dynamic: "I had my Jewishly Jewish friends, my non-Jewish friends and my assimilated Jewish friends."

In one section of the novel, Halkin portrays Melisande as ruminating on the nature of man's immortal soul, claiming that we make our own. Halkin adds that in some mystical way she believes she can, and one senses that he agrees with this proposition too. "We live in two worlds," he elucidates, "the 'what is' and the 'what if'?"

The 'what if', he says, is the mystical side and has evolved beyond the standard Jewish, religious sense of the world's mysteriousness, b

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Q and A with Hillel Halkin

Issue of February 26, 2010/ 12 Adar 5770

Hillel Halkin is the author of several books including the New York Times bestselling Letters to an American-Jewish Friend: A Zionist Polemic. His most recent work is a biography of Rabi Yehuda Halevi published by Nextbook. Halkin, who lives in Israel in Zichron Yaakov, spoke with the Jewish Star about the legacy of Yehuda Halevi, both as a poet and the author of the Kuzari.

Michael Orbach: What drew you to writing a book about Yehuda Halevi.

Hillel Halkin: It’s a combination. The book is written as part of a series. The editor of the books, Jonathan Rosen, said ‘pick your Jew.’ I thought who were my favorite Jewish figures were and in the end it came down to two or three, and I picked Yehuda Halevi, who has always been my favorite figure from Jewish history and literature, and one of my favorite Jews.

MO: Who were your other favorite Jews?

HH: Within the framework of the series, some people I might have written about, though they might have been eliminated, was Rabbi Akiva. Another possibility, and in a very

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A look at author Hillel Halkin

Hillel Halkin

Why might you be interested in reading a collection of essays by Hillel Halkin?

An American Jew who made aliyah in 1970, Halkin probably is best-known as Philologos. That’s the nom de plume he used to write a column on Hebrew and Yiddish etymology and idioms in The Forward for some two decades.

In addition, Halkin translated more than two dozen books from leading Yiddish and Hebrew writers into English – authors like Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and S.Y. Agnon. More recently, he wrote biographies of Yehuda Halevy and Vladimir Jabotinsky.

For me, Halkin always will be associated with his first book, “Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic.” The book came out in 1977, a short time after I had spent a year in Israel. While I intended to stay, I returned to the U.S. for many reasons. I felt as though Halkin was writing to me. His argument was simple and direct:

• For objective historical reasons, Jewish life in the Diaspora is doomed. Conversely, Jewish life has a possible future only in an autonomous or politic