Yaakov Astor

For more than three decades, Yaakov Astor has written about Jewish thought and the lives that illustrate it.

He is the author of the Rav Avigdor Miller series — on Emunah and Bitachon, Olam Haba, Tefillah, Middos, Teshuvah and the Yamim Nora'im, and Money — which brings the teachings of one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century to a new generation. Awaken Your Emunah and Awaken Your Emunah 2 follow Rav Miller's approach to discovering the Creator in the natural world, pairing profound insight with page after page of full-color photography.

He has also written with some of the best-known voices in the Jewish world, among them Rabbi Berel Wein, Rabbi Paysach Krohn, Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, and Rabbi Joseph Elias.

His own work takes up the questions people are usually too polite to ask out loud. Soul Searching examines what science can and cannot say about the soul's survival after death. The Hidden Hand searches for a pattern behind the great upheavals of the twentieth century.

And some of it is simply true stories, told straight. Run Rachel Run follows a teenage girl's daring escape from a Polish ghetto and her survival through the war — including how she persuaded the Nazis' own train driver to overturn a train carrying a thousand SS. Spies, Kings & Exiles collects the stranger corners of Jewish history. The Secret Life of Gershon Burd uncovers a young man whose quiet acts of kindness came to light only after he was gone.