Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based author, playwright, and translator. His most recent book is Necessary Stories, a collection of his short fiction. His previous books are 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). His play The Chair won the 2021 Theater Institute Award of the Contemporary Jewish Drama International Competition sponsored by the Estera Rachel and Ida Makinskie Jewish Theater in Warsaw.
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. He has translated the work of leading Israeli writers and scholars, including Tom Segev, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Shlomo Avineri, and Yuval Noah Harari. As a journalist, he he served as Israel correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education and the British science journal Nature. Links to articles of interest can be found here.
Since 2008, Haim has written more than 150 short stories under the rubric Necessary Stories, which until 2018 appeared in The Jerusalem Report, and since then inThe Times of Israel. A collection of some of the best stories was published in a Necessary Stories book in 2017. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Ilana. He is an active member of Kehilat Yedidya, a liberal Orthodox community equally concerned about democracy in Israeli society and traditional Jewish values.
Haim updates his readers about new work and other matters of interest on his Necessary Stories Substack newsletter.
Haim can be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Haim speaks and performs in Israel and overseas–information on his speaking topics and his new “Necessary Stories” performance can be found on his speaking topics page.
Contact Haim by e-mail at [email protected].
Photo of Haim Watzman by Debbi Cooper