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David de Wolf

David de Wolf was born in the Netherlands and studied Dutch and the history of art at the University of Nijmegen, graduating with a Master of Arts for his thesis on the architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Since then he has worked as a journalist, a tour guide in Italy and, since 1995, an independent communications consultant. In 2011, he moved to Israel, where he now lives with his family in Jerusalem.

He published his first novel, Solace of Stone, in 2013, a lyrical and exquisitely crafted meditation on the meaning and value of life and love. Ephraim’s Bones (2022) is a historical novel that follows Joseph Socher, a young Jew from Frankfurt, from the Germany of 1850 to Ottoman Jaffa thirty years later, by way of the enlightened salons of Europe and a prison cell in Venice, through assimilation and the loss of faith, the rise of anti-Semitism, and a search for meaning that brings him at last to the land of Israel and the doomed first attempt to settle it.

His collection of short stories, Sometimes, if only for a moment, is due out in autumn 2026. He is meanwhile at work on a new novel set in contemporary Israel.

Learn more about David de Wolf.

 

David de Wolf - Ephraim's Bones -novel
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Hebrew Bible

Is There Such a Thing as Jewish Art? – by David de Wolf

Open an art history book and you will barely find Judaism. Open a book on Judaism and you will barely find art. The two worlds seem to stand light-years apart – and the gap raises an uncomfortable, fascinating question. Does Judaism distrust art? Does God not care about beauty? That conclusion would be strange. Perhaps the question was never whether art lives inside Judaism, but how it lives there, and on what terms.

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June 22, 2026 No Comments