Yori Yanover's taste in theater runs to Beckett and Ionesco. He voted for Obama but insists on harboring moderate expectations (fewer disappointments). He attends the Stanton Street Shul, the "coolest Jewish congregation in New York," and is a stalwart of the Synagogue's culture ventures. Twinkle-eyed, grey-bearded, stocky and spritely, he lives with his family in a high rise on New York City's Lower East Side.

Yanover was born in Israel on Yom Kippur of 1954. His father had been liberated from a German concentration camp outside Munich in 1945. His mother was Israeli-born. He grew up in Tel Aviv and in his teens started to work as a journalist. His first publisher was "a bizarre left-wing youth magazine called Noar-71." He married and was soon divorced. He did not write for a living again until 1989.

The 1973 war began on his 19th birthday. He served on the southern front and went into Egypt with Ariel Sharon's division, but his assignments were non-combative: as a standup comic, he emceed a band that entertained the troops. Later he was a reporter for Bamachane Nachal, one of many periodicals published by the IDF.

Following his military service, he enrolled in NYU's school of film and TV, but ran out of tuition money and dropped out after three semesters. He knocked about New York in odd jobs (including animal-hospital janitor, taxi driver and counter man in a diner), began writing unpublished fiction, worked with emotionally troubled adolescents in group homes and taught secular studies in a few yeshivas. In 1977 he married his wife of more than 30 years, Nancy. They have a daughter who is now in her late teens and whom they are raising as a feminist.

In the summer of 1983, Yanover decided to return to the tradition of his late grandfather "and all the grandfathers before him." (They were from the Hasidic group that originated in Ger, the Yiddish name of Góra Kalwaria, a small town in Poland.) He admits, "the change was tough on my wife and on our marriage, but we survived." During the ‘80's, he produced and did "a little bit" of hosting on New York's WBAI Pacifica Radio. To this day, he says, radio production and sound editing are the arts that come most naturally to him. In 1988-9, he was DJ on a pirate radio ship, Arutz 7, which broadcast off the shore of Tel Aviv. He was picked because he knew radio, was religious, and at the time, had his wife's permission to live on the high seas.

Returning to New York, he resumed writing for a living, first for Israel Shelanu, a Hebrew language weekly, then Yediot Acharonot, where he was fired eventually for writing obstreperous columns. He wrote his first book in 1992-94, Dancing and Crying, a nonfiction work, published only in Hebrew, about the last two years in the life of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, detailing how his illness was affecting his followers. The book came out with a splash in 1994 (it made the cover of the Jerusalem Post and is now in several syllabi of Jewish Studies courses). In 1994, he became editor of the Jewish Communication Network, which featured the first daily Jewish webzine. He also developed there his own daily news blog, USAJewish, generating 8,000 to 12,000 unique visitors daily, which was enormous then and would be considerable even today.

He edited the Lubavitch News Service from 1998 to 2001. In 2004, he founded the Grand Street News, an ongoing monthly magazine which covers culture and public affairs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When Yori Yanover writes, it is often not to foster anybody's agreement. When he speaks, it is with a comedian's respect for logic and facts. The closest description of his politics would be avant-garde, free-thinking, or delightedly contrarian.

Or maybe—perish the thought!—traditionally socialist. He campaigns in his Grand Street News for the political traditions and long-lasting social service institutions of the Lower East Side, regarding the neighborhood as a model for New York. He explains that since everyone is relatively poor there, there are no class pressures and since there is no dominant ethnic group, there is little racial tension. He praises the progressive institutions of the district, such as The Henry Street Settlement and The Educational Alliance—social service agencies which were actually invented there more than a century ago—and credits them with keeping the neighborhood one of the safest and most family-oriented in New York City. He quips, "When Rush Limbaugh says socialism is coming, it cheers me up."