Neal Karlen was speaking Yiddish at home well before he was an Associate Editor at Newsweek and Contributing Editor for Rolling Stone. A long-time contributor to The New York Times, he has authored six other books, most recently, Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew. He has studied Yiddish at Brown University, New York's Inlingua Institute, and the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught non-fiction writing for six years. Neal currently lives in Minneapolis.