Deborah Hart Strober was born in into a family of musicians and journalists in Newark, New Jersey. Before embarking on both her marriage to Gerald Strober and her career as a writer, she performed as Deborah Hart in musical theatre and in concert. Later, she was for five years a cultural columnist and general assignment reporter with the New York Jewish Week.
Gerald S. Strober was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received an M.A. in Jewish Studies from New York University and served on the national staff of the American Jewish Committee. He is the co-author of Religion and the New Majority and the author of American Jews: Community in Crisis.
The Strobers, who have been writing together since 1989, are the co-authors of nine books to date. They include “Let Us Begin Anew:” An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, whose text was incorporated into the interactive computer of Legacy Room of the Kennedy Presidential Library, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency; Reagan: The Man and His Presidency; The Monarchy: An Oral Biography of Elizabeth II; His Holiness the Dalai Lama: The Oral Biography; Giuliani: Flawed or Flawless?; Israel at Sixty: an Oral History of the Nation Reborn; and Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World.
In compiling their nine books to date, the Strobers interviewed more than five hundred major personalities, including U.S. political figures and presidential officials, confidantes and foreign leaders; officials of the government of the United Kingdom and members of the British royal family; Tibetans in exile, including the Dalai Lama’s most trusted confidantes, as well a representative of their nemesis, the People’s Republic of China; supporters and critics of “America’s Mayor” and erstwhile presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani; a wide range of Israeli government officials and personalities, ranging from the extreme left to the ultra right; and, most recently, a cross-section of those individuals whose lives have been impacted by the Madoff scandal.
In addition, the Strobers were commissioned in 2006 to compile an audio tape archive on the History of the Conservative Movement in America, for which the authors interviewed forty-two of that movement’s leading personalities.
The Strobers, who have four children and four grandchildren, live in Manhattan and in Herzliya by the Sea, Israel.