“Lyrical, erudite, and quietly revelatory, To Life is the kind of book that rearranges one’s sense of where wonder, scholarship, and spiritual inquiry meet. Through vivid, deeply researched portraits, it illuminates a largely forgotten chapter of scientists and seekers whose work forever changed how we understand the living world.”—Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife

To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased, in vital ways, our understanding of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-length biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libby Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish.

By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.