Alexander Beider was born in Moscow in 1963. He started to work on the etymology and geographic distribution of Jewish surnames in 1986. His books dealing with surnames include: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (1993); Jewish Surnames in Prague (15th-18th centuries) (1995); A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (1996) ["Best Judaica Reference Book" award for 1996]; A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia (2004). His work A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names (2001) deals with traditional Yiddish first names. His papers on Jewish onomastics, methodological principles of search of etymologies of surnames, and the history of Yiddish have been published by scholarly journals in US, France, Israel, Poland, and Russia. He lectures frequently at Jewish genealogical conferences and at scholarly symposiums on Jewish topics. In 2000, he received his PhD in Jewish studies, from Sorbonne. Since 1990, Dr. Beider lives with his family in Paris, France.