Haim Watzman

Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer, journalist, and translator, and co-author, with Gershom Gorenberg, of the South Jerusalem blog. He is the author of Company C: An American's Life as a Citizen-Soldier in Israel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005) and A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2007). Haim was born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. After receiving a B.A. from Duke University he moved to Israel, where he has lived since 1978 and worked as a freelance translator and journalist. His translations include Tom Segev's The Seventh Million, Elvis in Jerusalem, and One Palestine Complete, as well as David Grossman's The Yellow Wind, Sleeping on a Wire, and Death as a Way of Life. As a journalist, he has written from Israel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the British science journal Nature and other publications. Links to articles of interest can be found here. Haim currently writes the monthly Necessary Stories column for The Jerusalem Report. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Ilana, and four children: Mizmor, a student; Asor, a soldier; and Niot and Misgav, high school students. He is an active member of Kehilat Yedidya, a liberal Orthodox community equally concerned about democracy in Israeli society and traditional Jewish values. Contact Haim by e-mail at hwatzman@gmail.com. Photo of Haim Watzman by Debbi Cooper