No one who knew Ben Hyman as a teenager would be surprised he would one day be named editorial director for Schocken Books, charged to reinvigorate a historic global imprint for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Looking back, Hyman tells PW, he could see he was meant to be a book editor.
In his Philadelphia high school, Hyman says he discovered his talent for "helping people express themselves more clearly." At Brown University, he double majored in comparative literature and international relations. Exploring varying global cultural, political, social, and economic perspectives, he says, prepared him for a publishing career. He started after graduation at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012 then moved to Bloomsbury in 2017. There, he edited a fistful of prestigious non-fiction award-winners and finalists. On Linked In, he described his particular interests in history, psychology/mental health, arts/design, and current affairs.
But when he saw the Schocken job posting in February, he says, "It struck me as one of the most intellectually interesting jobs that had opened up in publishing in a really long time, one with lot of room to grow and do something good."
Room indeed. The house with a backlist boasting of Sholem Aleichem, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Harold S. Kushner, Joan Nathan, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal—and many more luminaries of literature, ethics, theology, philosophy, and culture—had published barely a book or two a year since 2022. The Schocken editorial director, Altie Karper, who led the imprint to 17 National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists, while also acquiring titles for Pantheon, retired in December. And Lisa Lucas, senior VP and publisher for both the Schocken and Pantheon imprints from 2020 to May 2024, saw her role eliminated during a restructuring of the Penguin Random House's Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group in May.
Hyman, who began the job in July, reports to Knopf publisher and editor-in-chief Jordan Pavlin, who has said she's excited to see how Schocken will "evolve." Hyman's answer: expect growth in the breadth of the list, but no change in its fundamental character. While there have always been —and will continue to be — Schocken authors who are not Jewish, it will always be a "Jewish-inflected" press aligned with Jewish values, says Hyman.
Schocken has published "a living record of what Jews here have been interested in over the past 80 years. That's incredible. You see both the absolute best in Judaica and a kind of internationalism that comes from its founding era. You see books that have incredible longevity and are of extraordinary quality. I also am really drawn to the eclecticism of the list in the same way that Jews themselves are plural and multifaceted and ever-evolving and curious and all of these things.
He highlighted two books so far. Coming in 2026 will be a queer, feminist spiritual memoir by Jewish singer-songwriter Alicia Jo Rabins, When We Are Born We Forget Everything, acquired for Schocken by a Pantheon editor, Anna Kaufman. In her own excited Instagram post, Rabins called Schocken her "dream press." And then in 2027, Arab/Jew by Maurice Chammah, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist explores the stories of Syrian Jews who left their troubled homeland and those who remained. "There is increasing interest in Jewish publishing to look at the lost world of Arab/Jewish co-existence in the Middle East," Hyman says.
"I don't think there has ever been a moment in my lifetime when it's been so interesting to think about what it means to be Jewish, when people are reexamining what our relationship is to this tradition and to this aspect of our identities."
