I am a ghost writer.On June 13, 1965, I died in Israel. I was 87. My health had been failing since I underwent surgery for a broken leg. Since my release from the hospital, I was confined to bed at my home in the residential quarter of Talbeih. After my death, the New York Times referred to me as "the foremost Jewish religious thinker of our times and one of the world’s most influential philosophers."In life, A personal religious crisis caused me to turn away from the religious customs of the Jews; and I absorbed myself in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. This inspired me to take up philosophy during my university years. In 1899, I met my future wife Paula Winkler while studying in Zurich. Paula was a non-Jewish Zionist writer. She was from Munich and later converted to Judaism. I studied art history and philosophy in Leipzig, Zurich, Berlin, and Vienna. I read the nineteenth century classic German, Russian, and Danish novels. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Soren Kierkegaard helped me shape my ideas on philosophy. I acquired my doctorate in 1904 writing my thesis on German mysticism.  My evocative, sometimes poetic, writing style celebrated the major themes in my work: the retelling of Hasidic and Chinese tales, Biblical commentary, and metaphysical dialogue. I was known as one of the paramount spiritual leaders of the Twentieth Century and best known as the author of I and Thou--the basic formulation of my philosophy of dialogue.I and Thou is among the twentieth century's foundational documents of religious ethics. The close association of the relation to God with the relation to one's fellow-men is my most essential concern. Before discussing the relationship between God and me, I explained at length the range and ramifications of the ways people treat one another and the ways they bear themselves in society. You should beware of understanding your conversation with God as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday. God's address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns those events into instruction—into demands for you and me. Consistent with Kierkegaard, I gave expression to the intuition that we need to withstand the temptation to reduce human relations to the simple either/or of Apollonian or Dionysian rational or romantic ways of relating to others. We are beings that can enter into dialogic relations not just with human others, but with other animate beings, such as animals, or trees—as well as with the Divine Thou. Throughout I and Thou, I argued for an ethic that does not use other people (or books, or trees, or God), and does not consider them objects of one's own personal experience. Instead, I wrote that we must learn to consider everything around us as "You" speaking to "me," and requiring a response. In death, I have collected very short stories from the great rabbis of old. These stories embody my perception of the world and my ethics. And these stories expose my lighter side—my love of Jewish humor.Open Access PolicyYou are free to share, copy, or redistribute the materials in this text in any medium or format. You are free to adapt, reuse, modify, transform, or build upon the materials in this text for any purpose whatsoever.