Gustavo Perednik

Gustavo Daniel Perednik (Buenos Aires, 1956), is a Jewish author and educator residing in Israel.

Perednik graduated from the Universities of Buenos Aires and Jerusalem (cum laude) and he completed doctoral studies in Philosophy in New York and took courses at the Sorbonne (France), San Marcos (Peru) and Uppsala (Sweden). He was distinguished as outstanding lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he ran the Four-Year, Preparatory and Freshman Programs. In Jerusalem he was also director of the Institute for Jewish Leaders from Abroad and the Sephardic Educational Centre. He ran the Ai Tian Program for Jewish Understanding in China, and the Program for Education on the Jewish Role in Civilization. He resides with his family in the outskirts of Jerusalem. He was guest lecturer at more than one hundred towns in fifty countries and published fifteen books and more than one thousand articles on Judaism and modernity.

Biography
Perednik was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 21, 1956, the only child of Marta (1925–2001) and Samuel (1923–1994), first generation of Argentineans born to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. He studied at the Buenos Aires English High School, and the Escuela Superior de Comercio Carlos Pellegrini.

Community Work
He taught in dozens of Jewish institutions throughout Latin America and founded the Centro Hebreo Yonah of Argentina, which he led into a youth movement of two thousand members. A member of the Sino-Judaic Institute, in 2001 he established in China the Ai Tian Program of Jewish Understanding through which he lectured in many Chinese universities and high schools. His published several essays on the relation between the Jews and the Chinese.

In June 2006, after a successful lecturing tour in several towns of Galicia, Spain, he took the initiative to found the Association of Gallegan Friends of Israel (AGAI).

First books
In 1980 his novella There at the Santanders was awarded the Victoria Ocampo Literary Prize, and it was published in English in the Stories magazine of Boston in 1985.

In 1982 he obtained The Jerusalem Fellows scholarship to study in Jerusalem for a three-year period, during which he completed his MA in Education at the Hebrew University (cum laude) and his doctoral studies at The Jewish Theological Seminary of New York. Perednik pursued Talmudic studies first under Rabbi Theodore Friedmann, and then under Rabbi Baruch Horovitz at the Dvar Yerushalayim Yeshiva. Rabbi Horovitz performed his wedding in 1985 to Ruth Kestenbaum, an educational psychologist from London, with whom he had five children.

Perednik’s novel Achitophel, a fantasy on suicide, was published in 1988 with a prologue by Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit, and it received the Literary International Prize Fernando Jeno of Mexico. That year he was invited to lecture for one month to Los Angeles by the Sephardic Educational Center, and since then he lectured in one hundred towns of more than fifty countries. In 1989 the Argentine Jewish Community published his two-volume book I am a Hebrew, prologued by Prof. Michael Rosenak of the Hebrew University. The following year the Hebrew University appointed him as head of the Four-Year, Freshman and Preparatory Programs, where he lectured for many years and was distinguished as outstanding lecturer.

During the 1990s he was director of the Institute Youth Leaders from Abroad. His essay on Judaism and Ecology was published in 1990 and received the Keren Kayemet Prize, and in 1992 his novel Lemech was published in Tel Aviv, a fictional history of WWII with Freud, Bertha Pappenheim and Eduard Hanslick as main protagonists.

Judeophobia and Other Books
At the Institute for Youth Leaders Perednik created a course on Judeophobia, which he taught in several languages and was published as a book in many editions. He gave the full course on Judeophobia at several universities in Israel, Spain and Latin America.

In 2004 he published in Barcelona Spain Derailed, with a prologue by Pilar Rahola, about Islamic terrorism and the inadequate response of the West.

Since 2004 Perednik gives courses at the ORT Uruguay University on the Jewish contribution to civilization, about which he published three books. In 2008 Perednik created an exhibition on the subject, which was presented in main venues in Argentina.

His novel Darwin’s silence was published in 2007, and it was analyzed in a doctoral thesis for the University of Stockholm, Sweden. In 2009, his book To Kill Without a Trace was published, about the Iranian terror attacks in Argentina. The book was presented in many towns in Israel, Argentina, and Latin America. That year, Pablo Besaron published La conspiración, on Argentine literature, which includes a chapter on Perednik’s novels. In 2010, a course on Perednik's novels was given at the Asociacion Argentina de Cultura Inglesa.

Work

 * There at the Santanders (1980)
 * Achitofel (1988)
 * I am a Hebrew (1989)
 * Protection of Four Thousand Years – Judaism and Ecology (1990)
 * Lemech (1992)
 * Judeophobia (2001)
 * Spain Derailed- Islamist Terror and the Awakening of the West (2004)
 * Great Thinkers (2005)
 * Darwin’s Silence (2006)
 * Outstanding Thinkers (2006)
 * Famous Thinkers (2007)
 * The innovator and his environment
 * Course on Judeophobia
 * Program for Jewish Education
 * To Kill Without a Trace (2009)
 * The Motherland Was a Book (2010) on the influence of the Hebrew Bible in Western Civilization
 * Mankind and Chess (2012)
 * Kafkania (2012)

Essays in Anthologies:
 * Naïve Spanish Judeophobia, in the Jewish Political Studies Review 15:3-4, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Fall 2003, pages 87–110.
 * L’Espagne en Les habits neufs de l’antisemitisme en Europe, Collection Dissidence, Éditions Café Noir, Paris, 2004, pages 133-153.
 * The Chinese of Jewish Descent at Kaifeng, in Alternative Orientalisms, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2007