A Tribute to Mosaic’s Founding Editor

This month, Mosaic’s founding editor, Neal Kozodoy, officially stepped back from his duties and handed the reins over to Jonathan Silver. He will stay on as editor-at-large. (Read more about the change here.) To commemorate his editorship, we asked several of Mosaic‘s regular writers to tell us what Neal meant to them and what they accomplished together.

Eric Cohen

Editing is a priestly vocation, even for Neal Kozodoy, the greatest Jewish editor of the last half century. To edit is to mediate: between writer and audience, between an author’s own insights, intuitions, and ideas to a mature argument or elegy offered to the world. The most important editors care first and most about getting it right, about helping great writers and young writers and contrarian writers say what they need to say—or discover what they need to say—with greater depth and clarity. In this selfless, sacrificial vocation, Neal Kozodoy is simply as good as it gets. The invisible director, the humble master behind the curtain, Neal is a man who devoted his generational talent and incredible work ethic to the arena of ideas, all for the sake of his writers, his readers, and—yes—the truth.