Fred Skolnik was born in New York City and has lived in Israel since 1963, working mostly as an editor and translator. He is also the author of The Other Shore (Aqueous Books, 2011), an epic novel depicting Israeli society at a critical juncture in its recent history. A second novel, Death, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2015. His stories and essays have appeared in over 100 journals, including TriQuarterly, Gargoyle, The MacGuffin, Los Angeles Review, Prism Review, Words & Images, Literary House Review, Montréal Review, Underground Voices, Third Coast, Word Riot, The Recusant, and Polluto. Under his Fred Russell pen name, he published two novels in 2014: Rafi's World (Fomite Press) and The Links in the Chain (CCLaP). He is also the editor in chief of the 22-volume second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, winner of the 2007 Dartmouth Medal and hailed as a landmark achievement by the Library Journal. Other award-winning projects with which he has been associated include The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (co-editor, 2002) and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (senior editor, 2001).