Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (/fɔːr/;[1] born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019).[2] He teaches creative writing at New York University.[3]
This article is about the American writer. For the Australian media personality, see John Safran.
Jonathan Safran Foer
February 21, 1977
Washington, D.C., U.S.
JSF
Novelist
Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
2
Esther Safran Foer (mother)
- Franklin Foer (brother)
- Joshua Foer (brother)
Early life and education[edit]
Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., as the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.[4][5] Safran Foer is the middle son of a Jewish family. His older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is the founder of Atlas Obscura and of Sefaria. Safran Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."[4][6]
Safran Foer attended Georgetown Day School and in 1994 traveled to Israel with other North American Jewish teenagers in a program sponsored by Bronfman youth fellowships.[7] In 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates,[8] who took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy."[9] Safran Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."[9] Safran Foer graduated with an A.B. in philosophy from Princeton in 1999 after completing a 40-page-long senior thesis, titled "Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author", under the supervision of Gideon Rosen.[10] Oates served as the advisor to Safran Foer's creative writing senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Safran Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.[11][12]
After graduating from Princeton, Safran Foer briefly attended the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.[13]
Views[edit]
Safran Foer has been an outspoken critic of the meat industry. In 2006, he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an exposé of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.[34] Safran Foer's first book of non-fiction, Eating Animals (2009), addresses problems associated with industrialized meat and the ensuing ethical concerns.[35] He said that he had long been "uncertain about how I felt [about eating meat]" and that the birth of his first child inspired "an urgency because I would have to make decisions on his behalf".[36]
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Safran Foer reiterated his argument that Americans should eat less meat on account of the meat industry's social, environmental, and humanitarian consequences.[37]
In his personal life, Safran Foer has been an occasional vegetarian since the age of 10.[36]
Personal life[edit]
In June 2004, Safran Foer married writer Nicole Krauss. They lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, and have two children. The couple divorced in 2014.
From 2015 until 2017, Safran Foer dated actress Michelle Williams.[38][39]
Criticism[edit]
Because of Safran Foer's frequent use of modernist literary devices, he is often named as a polarizing figure in modern literature. In his critical article "Extremely Cloying & Incredibly False", Harry Siegel wrote in the New York Press, "Foer is supposed to be our new Philip Roth, though his fortune-cookie syllogisms and pointless illustrations and typographical tricks don't at all match up to or much resemble Roth even at his most inane."[40]
In response to charges of historical inaccuracy in Everything is Illuminated, Safran Foer defended himself in The Guardian, writing, "Rather than aligning itself with either 'how things were' or 'how things could have been', the novel measures the difference between the two, and by so doing attempts to reflect a kind of experiential (rather than historical or journalistic) truth."[41]