Jonathan Fine

Jonathan Fine was born in 1958 in Tel Aviv

Jonathan David Fine was born in Tel Aviv on July 25, 1958. He was the elder child of Bernard Fine, an engineer who immigrated from Chicago, and the poet Zerubavela Sasonkin, daughter of the poet Alexander Penn. He had one sister, Hagar.

He joined the IDF in 1976 and served in the Golani Brigade. In the First Lebanon War he was an officer with the rank of captain. Many of his later stories were set against that war.

He earned a master's degree in Judaism at the Schechter Institute in 1989 and a master's in history at the Hebrew University in 1990. In 2005 he received a doctorate in history from the Hebrew University, on the founding of Israel's system of government between 1947 and 1951. In 2006 he was ordained a Conservative rabbi.

Fine studied fundamentalism in different religions and the ideologies of terror groups. He taught at the Lauder School of Government at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and in the history department at Ben-Gurion University. He was also a research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

He was married to literature scholar Professor Ruth Fine and had 2 sons. They lived in French Hill, Jerusalem. He died of cardiac arrest during a lecture tour in Australia on August 21, 2015.