Steven Weitzman is the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and also serves as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. His recent publications include The Origin of the Jews: the Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, winner of a National Jewish Book Award; Solomon: the Lure of Wisdom, part of the award-winning Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press; and the coauthored The Jews: History, published in its third edition in 2019. He is currently writing a book that explores the role of the Ten Plagues story in how people in different ages understand and imagine disaster, provisionally entitled A History of Signs and Wonders.