Meri-Jane Rochelson is professor emerita of English at Florida International University. She is the author of A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Wayne State University Press, 2008), editor of Zangwill's 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto (Wayne State University Press, 1998), and co-editor of Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s. She has published many articles and presented papers on late Victorian and Anglo-Jewish literature and culture. Her edition of Israel Zangwill's The Melting-Pot is forthcoming from Broadview Press.

After winning an international audience with his novel Children of the Ghetto, Israel Zangwill went on to write numerous short stories, four additional novels, and several plays, including The Melting Pot. Author Meri-Jane Rochelson, a noted expert on Zangwill's work, examines his career from its beginnings in the 1890s to the performance of his last play, We Moderns, in 1924, to trace how Zangwill became the best-known Jewish writer in Britain and America and a leading spokesperson on Jewish affairs throughout the world. In A Jew in the Public Arena, Rochelson examines Zangwill's published writings alongside a wealth of primary materials, including letters, diaries, manuscripts, press cuttings, and other items in the vast Zangwill files of the Central Zionist Archives, to demonstrate why an understanding of Israel Zangwill's career is essential to understanding the era that so significantly shaped the modern Jewish experience.