Robert Alter & Jonathan Kirsch

Professor Robert Alter has published widely on the modern European and American novel, on modern Hebrew Literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible.  The 1995 recipient of the Scholarship Award for Social and Cultural Studies of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Prof. Alter is the author of two prize winning volumes on literary aspects of the Bible, his works include Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, The World of Biblical Literature, and Hebrew and Modernity. His most recent works are Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture, and Imagined Cities.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God.  “Kirsch's powerful and cautionary account is essential reading,” says Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “for anyone who wants to understand the potential dark side of religion.”

Kirsch is the author of eleven other books, including the best-selling A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization, the national best-sellers The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible and King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, and the best-selling God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism. Kirsch is also a longtime book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, a guest commentator and broadcaster for NPR affiliates KCRW-FM and KPCC-FM in Southern California, an Adjunct Professor on the faculty of New York University, and an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property in Los Angeles.