Jalal Al-e Ahmad was born to a clerical religious family in Tehran in 1923. A teacher all his life, he joined the Communist Tudeh Party in 1943 and quickly rose through its ranks, becoming a member of the party committee for Tehran, before breaking with the Tudeh in 1947 in protest over Soviet influence. Al-e Ahmad was an influential and prolific writer and social critic, whose body of work includes short stories, notably the collection An Exchange of Visits; novels including By the Pen, The School Principal, and A Stone on a Grave; travelogues including A Straw in Mecca, A Journey to Russia, and A Journey to America; anthropological studies; essays; reviews; and translations. His best known work is Gharbzadegi (Occidentosis), which has also been translated to English as "Weststruckness" and "Westoxification," a cultural critique of Westernization in Iran. In 2013, Restless Books published his polemical work based on his journey to Israel as The Israeli Republic. Al-e Ahmad was married to the novelist and translator Simin Daneshvar; the couple had no children. He died in 1969.

Simin Daneshvar (born April 28, 1921, Shiraz, Iran-died March 8, 2012, Tehran, Iran), was an Iranian author who wrote the enduringly popular Savushun (1969; published in English as Savushun: A Novel About Modern Iran, 1990, and as A Persian Requiem, 1991), the first modern Persian-language novel written by a woman. In 1948, while Daneshvar was studying Persian literature at the University of Tehran (Ph.D., 1949), she published a short-story collection, Atesh-e khamush (The Quenched Fire), the first such book by a woman to come out in Iran. She published a second collection, Shahri chun behesht (1961; A City as Paradise) before embarking on Savushun. Later novels include Jazireh-ye Sargardani (1992; The Island of Perplexity) and Sareban-e sargardan (2002; Wandering Caravan Master). She was also known for her translations into Persian of such writers as Anton Chekhov and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Daneshvar was married (1950-69) to noted writer and intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad and taught art history at the University of Tehran from the late 1950s until her retirement in 1979.

Samuel Thrope is a writer and translator based in Jerusalem. Born and raised in Arlington, Massachusetts, he earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a fellow at the Martin Buber Society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bernard Avishai lives in Jerusalem and New Hampshire. He is a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth and an adjunct professor of business at Hebrew University. His most recent book is Promiscuous: "Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. He is also the author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic.