American
Michael Robert Wolf is an American novelist and Messianic rabbi. Raised in a traditional Jewish household in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah in his twenties and later graduated magna cum laude in English and literature from Temple University in 1976. He leads Beth Messiah, a Messianic Jewish congregation in the Cincinnati, Ohio area, alongside writing fiction, plays, and screenplays that draw on his own passage between Jewish and Christian worlds. His debut novel, The Upper Zoo (2012), follows a Jewish boy in a 1960s classroom for under-achievers and the autistic, Jesus-devoted classmate who changes him; Wolf adapted it into the Dove-approved film The Sound of the Spirit. His second novel, The Linotype Operator (2016), follows a retired Orthodox Jewish Linotype operator and his two daughters in present-day Brooklyn and Manhattan; its sequel, The Other: The Linotype Legacy (2019), was a finalist in the Religious Fiction category of American Book Fest's Best Book Awards. His fiction is consistently semi-autobiographical, using one family's story to work through questions of tradition, faith, and who counts as an outsider within one's own community.