Dara Horn. Photo: darahorn.com.

Dara Horn

Author

Author Dara Horn, who still makes public appearances in connection with her fourth and latest novel “A Guide for the Perplexed,” has made elements of Jewish history and text accessible to new audiences worldwide.

She has described the book as the story of a software developer who creates an app that records everything that its users do.

Yet the book is about much more. The contemporary plot of the book is actually a rewrite of the Joseph story from the Torah, but with women characters instead of men.

“There is also a historical component that is about the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, which was this massive trove of about 190,000 medieval documents,” said Horn, who holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard.

Maimonides’ drafts of his original “Guide for the Perplexed” were found in the Geniza, which Horn creatively views as a medieval version of Facebook.