Joseph Lowin has a Ph.D. in French literature from Yale University, was a Fulbright Scholar and Jerusalem Fellow and taught at Yale University, The University of Miami, and Touro College. He eventually left a career in academia for leadership positions in Jewish cultural organization and served as, among others, Executive Director of the National Center for the Hebrew Language. He has been the Hebrew columnist at Hadassah Magazine for more than thirty years and is the author of four books, among them HebrewSpeak and HebrewTalk, precursors to the book in your hands, HebrewMatters. During a Sabbatical year in Jerusalem, he had a weekly spot on Kol Yisrael, presenting to a world-wide radio audience Hebrew "Roots and Sources with Dr. Joe." Joseph Lowin is also the author of a literary biography of the American novelist, short story writer and essayist Cynthia Ozick (Twayne, 1988). Most recently, Rowman & Littlefield published Lowin's Art and the Artist in the Contemporary Israeli Novel (2017), a study of eight major Israeli novelists and their artistic contributions to a culture and civilization that have often been preoccupied by other matters.