Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in Washington, D.C., on February 21, 1977. His mother, Esther Safran Foer, is now an advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue and is also the child of Polish Holocaust survivors. Jonathan Safran Foer attended Princeton University. During his first year at Princeton, Safran Foer’s writing caught the attention of the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who encouraged him to pursue writing more seriously. Safran Foer graduated with a degree in philosophy from Princeton in 1999. He also wrote a creative writing thesis that went on to become his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, which was first published in 2002. After that, Safran Foer published three more novels, including Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which is about the September 11 attacks, Tree of Codes (2010), and Here I Am (2016). Safran Foer has been a vegetarian since he was 10 years old, and he wrote a nonfiction book in 2011 titled Eating Animals about the ethics of factory farming and consuming animals. He is also the author of the book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, published in 2019, about what moral obligations individual people have in the face of climate change.