Barbara Bensoussan is the quintessential Jewish dropout who never finished her Ph.D. but went on to teach English and Introductory Psychology at the University of Michigan. She worked as a social worker for OHEL, an ESL teacher, and various other stints before easing into full time writing. Her 20-year-plus career followed the growth of frum publishing, and she wrote articles for many Jewish publications before settling in at Mishpacha. Barbara is the author of the young adult novel A New Song (Targum), the food memoir The Well-Spiced Life (Israel Bookshop), and the co-author of Converted Masters, an art book; she has also authored private memoirs and taught writing workshops. All of this, of course, gets accomplished in the margins of Barbara’s day job as a wife, mother and grandmother.
Binyamin Rose is the Editor At Large of Mishpacha Magazine, the dominant media influence on America’s Orthodox Jewish population today. Based in Jerusalem, Binyamin travels frequently to interview leading newsmakers and politicians worldwide and has visited 26 countries as of 2018.
Binyamin entered journalism in 1978, reporting for two daily New Jersey newspapers, going on to serve as a news director and producer at major-market all-news stations in Miami and Charlotte. Following senior positions in trading, wealth management, and public relations, Binyamin returned to journalism as news editor at the inception of the Mishpacha Magazine’s English-language edition in 2004, before taking early retirement in 2018.
Binyamin writes to inform, not to impress.
Libi Astaire writes about Jewish history, archeology, and art for Mishpacha. She is also the author of the award-winning Jewish Regency Mystery Series, which has introduced lovers of mystery novels to what is often a forgotten community—the Ashkenazic Jews who settled in England during the 1700s and early 1800s. A selection of her articles has been published in the book Day Trips to Jewish History.
Libi, who lives in Jerusalem, got her start as a novelist when Terra Incognita, a novel about Spain’s modern-day crypto-Jews, was serialized in Mishpacha. Since then, Terra Incognita has been published in English as both an e-book and paperback, as well as translated into Yiddish.
For more information about the series or Libi Astaire’s other books, visit her website or her author’s page at Amazon.com.
Dovid Bashevkin is the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union, and an instructor at Yeshiva University, where he teaches courses on public policy, religious crisis, and rabbinic thought. After studying in Yeshivas Ner Yisroel, he completed rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, as well as a Master’s degree at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies focusing on the thought of Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin under the guidance of Dr. Yaakov Elman. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Public Policy and Management at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, focusing on crisis management. In 2014, Dovid published a sefer on sin in Jewish thought entitled B’Rogez Rachem Tizkor and recently published an English work entitled Sinˑaˑgogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought (Boston: Academic Studies Press). Dovid has been rejected from several prestigious fellowships and awards.
