JOE BOBKER was born in early 1947 in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp in Ulm, southern Germany, to Polish Holocaust survivors R' Chaskel, zt"l, and Ida Bobker, zt"l. On May 21, 1949, the family arrived in Sydney, Australia, aboard the Luciano Marnaro liner as part of the 10,000 refugees allowed in from Adolf Hitler's reign of terror. Bobker attended Randwick Boy's High, a public school by day, and a traditional cheder in the mornings and afternoons. After graduating from the University of New South Wales in 1969 with a PhD in Architecture he continued his studies at the legendary Mercaz HaRav Kook yeshiva in Kiryat Moshe, Jerusalem. Over the years he has spoken frequently in public and written scores of essays on Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, and the Holocaust for a variety of newspapers including the hundred-year-old Los Angeles Jewish Times of which he was Publisher and Editor-in-Chief for twelve years between 1988 and 2000. Bobker's writings cover a wide variety of non-fiction Jewish subjects from a very personal, philosophical, and often whimsical perspective. He is the author of the popular Torah With a Twist of Humor series, of which this is a part, and the scholarly fifteen-volume Historiography of Orthodox Jews and the Holocaust. Since 1980 he has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem with his wife Miriam Sarah, a barrister from Melbourne and child of Holocaust survivors R' Baruch, zt"l, and Rivka Kohn, zt"l.

When asked where his inspiration comes from he ticks off the names of sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren: Eli and Hadassah, Avi and Baylie, Benny and Layella, Dovi and Devorah, Dalia, Toby, Boruch, Henny, Daniel, Ziggy, Tali, Chesky, Zevi, Mordechai, Shira, Rivka, Yoni, Mattie, Dovid'l, Gali, Rikki, Asher, Leah, Shoshana, Boruch'l, and Yehudis.