Jonathan Rosen is author of the novel Eve's Apple and former editor of the Arts and Letters section of the Forward. In this erudite work, the author explores the process of "learning to embrace contradictory forces: ancient tradition and contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and hope." Rosen sees himself as both a child of the Internet and as a surfer of the Talmud. Although the technology of the computer intrigues him and he uses it in his work and in his study, the resources of ancient Judaism are what really stir his soul.

Early on Rosen observes: "I have often thought, contemplating a page of Talmud, that it bears a certain uncanny resemblance to a home page on the Internet, where nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations." The author is a great devotee of the Jewish spiritual practice of study. He writes about his interest in the Talmudic hero Yochanan ben Zakkai and the historian of the Jews Flavius Josephus. He salutes the spirits of his American-born and his European-born grandmothers. And along the way, Rosen patches together his own vision of unity in a world of disjointedness.