Halkin will speak about the B’nei Menashe and the related NGO Degel Menashe in which Halkin is heavily involved.

Watch Talk Here

More About Hillel Halkin

Hillel Halkin is  a writer, and translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literature into English. He has translated Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman, and major Hebrew and Israeli novelists, among them Yosef Haim Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, Shulamith Hareven, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Meir Shalev.

Halkin won a National Jewish Book Award in 1978 for his first book Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist's Polemic (1977).

Halkin's second book, Across the Sabbath River (2002), is a work of travel literature in which he goes in search of B'nei Menashe and the mystery of the Ten Lost Tribes. As a result, he became increasingly interested in the B'nei Menashe, who began to immigrate to Israel from India in the late 20th century.

Since then he has written A Strange Death, a novel based on the local history of Zikhron Ya'akov, where he resides. His intellectual biography of Yehuda Halevi won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.

He has also written the novel Melisande! What Are Dreams? published in 2012 and then in 2014, Halkin published a new biography of Vladimir Jabotinsky for Jewish Lives by Yale University Press.

Halkin writes frequently on Israel and Jewish culture and politics. His articles have been published in Commentary, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post and other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books. He has spoken twice at Davar; once on his biography of Yehuda Halevi and the second on early and late Zionism.