Josh Fogel (b. 1950 in NYC) grew up in Berkeley, California, attended the University of Chicago (1968-1972) undergrad and Columbia University (1972-1980) for his PhD in Chinese and Japanese history. He taught at Harvard University (1981-1988), the University of California, Santa Barbara (1989-2005), and York University (2005-present). During the academic year 1980-1981, he was a post-doc at Columbia and took the opportunity to satisfy a long-desired opportunity to enroll in first-year Yiddish. Little did he know that Columbia was the center of the Yiddish world (or one of them). He became quite close with his teacher Mortkhe Schaechter who inspired him to continue studying the language. As he was pursuing his own research over the years, he kept his hand in Yiddish, translating work by Shmuel Niger, Y.-Y. Singer, and Yehoash. But, he was also keenly aware, from experience in his own field, that he was not working at the intellectual center of Yiddish studies and was looking for a way to make a modest contribution. One refrain one hears from publishers all the time is that, if a work in a foreign language is really important, those interested in reading it will read it in the original. Don't believe it. So, he began about six years ago to translate the Leksikon and post its entries online as they were completed. He figured that no publisher would want to published ten volumes of translation, and this way the work would be immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. Also, any typos or factual errors or mistranslations could be immediately corrected. Furthermore, many people wrote in the "comments" to various entries that they had discovered long-lost relatives. That was extremely gratifying. As of September 4, 2023, there have been over one million visits to the site.