About Allen Katzoff, the Author

For the latter half of my professional career, I directed large Jewish educational programs in the American Jewish community. Beginning in 1990 I spent six years as the administrator and later the director of Camp Ramah in New England, a large Jewish educational overnight camp. I had loved working there for many summers in the early ’70’s when I was in college and going back to camp had always been a dream of mine.  After leaving Ramah I served as the director of the Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts for eight years until 2007.  This was a large adult education center where we had many thousands of participants each year attending classes and public lectures. In these latter positions I combined my passion for informal and voluntary education with the marketing and business skills I had acquired during an earlier career in the private sector.

More relevant to this blog, beginning in 2007, my wife, Joan Leegant, who is an amazing writer (yes I am biased! See www.joanleegant.com) and author most recently of Wherever You Go from W.W. Norton (a novel about Jewish extremism in Israel), has been the visiting writer for part of each year in the Shaindy Rudolph Creative Writing Program, a Masters degree program in the English Department at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Thus we get to come to Israel for about six months a year, experiencing Israeli life in all of its variety. It also affords us the opportunity to observe what is happening politically in Israel today, something that is more difficult to do from a distance in America.

Most important, we have two wonderful sons who both are entrepreneurs. Our eldest, Eli Katzoff, founded Stormport Productions (www.stormportproductions.com), a video production company in the Boston area. Our younger son, Nathaniel Katzoff, is a woodworker and boat builder who owns NK Woodworking (www.nkwoodworking.com) in Seattle. Both are incredibly skilled and creative, which they get from their mother. They are also real mensches, also from their mother.

For more information about this blog, see https://sevenmonthsintelaviv.com/about/

Allen Katzoff

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