Jonathan Orr-Stav is the son and grandson of Hebrew translators and editors (his grandfather, Binyamin Eliav, was among other things one of the chief editors of the Encyclopaedia Judaica; his mother was the late Israeli writer, translator and editor, Yael Lotan).

Raised during the first half of his childhood in Jamaica, London and New York and the latter half in Israel, he returned to London to study and work in architecture and computer-aided-design (CAD), during the 1980s and early 90s. You can only run so far from your roots, however, and prior to returning to Israel in 1995 he found himself gravitating to writing — first in a series of best-selling books on CAD, then as a technical writer in the Israeli high-technology sector, and finally as the author of Aleph Through the Looking Glass, a radical new method for mastering the Hebrew script, published by Yale University Press in Nov 2005. In 2017, after eighteen years of development, he published the world’s first Hebrew Simulator—the first computerised tool for lossless conversion of Square Hebrew to Roman characters and back again.

In response to increasing demand for his services as a translator, he is now engaged chiefly in translation – with his other interests of design, development of Hebrew-language applications, and teaching CAD relegated to what little spare time he has.