Janet Suzman: A Life in Focus
Long recognised as one of the world’s leading Shakespearians, Dame Janet Suzman is the definitive Cleopatra and an RSC associate artist who staged a landmark Othello in her native South Africa. For six decades she has captivated audiences, earning Oscar, Olivier and BAFTA nominations for Nicholas and Alexandra and Hedda Gabler. The Pragnell Award winner […]
The West, the Jews & a Broken Promise
The global future looks darker than it has for generations. In Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, Jake Wallis Simons warns that rising nationalism and antisemitic violence – from Amsterdam and London to Melbourne and New York – signal a deeper threat to liberal democracy. Radicals across the spectrum, he argues, […]
A Poetry of Migration
Poets Annie Freud, Stephen Duncan, and Jennifer Langer, chaired by Monica Bohm-Duchen, explore German-Jewish heritage in the UK. Using poetry, they reflect on exile, Weimar culture, memory, and identity, considering what the Second Generation inherits from their parents’ emigration, the Holocaust, and the cultural richness of pre-war Germany, and how it shapes their sense of […]
Carole King: In Words & Music
55 years after Tapestry transformed popular music, selling 30 million copies, we celebrate one of its greatest icons. Edward Seckerson, host of our recent tributes to Richard Rogers and Leonard Bernstein, talks to formerForward editor Jane Eisner about her Jewish Lives biography Carole King: She Made the Earth Move. And performing some of her classic […]
The Traitors Circle with Jonathan Freedland
As a special preview to our 75th anniversary celebrations, we welcome acclaimed writer, broadcaster and Jewish Book Week favourite Jonathan Freedland for an evening exploring his gripping new work of history, The Traitors Circle. In conversation with City Lit principal Mark Malcomson, Freedland revisits the extraordinary true story of the German men and women who […]
Family Affairs: From Salonica to the Open Road
Two acclaimed novelists explore the tangled bonds of family through distinctly Jewish lenses. Michael Arditti’s The Tribe follows a Sephardic dynasty from Salonica to France, tracing love, conflict and survival across continents and the upheavals of the twentieth century. Benjamin Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives offers a quieter, contemporary portrait: a midlife journey across […]
Autism: A Family Memoir
Caroline Elton invites readers into the vivid, complicated world of her brother Lionel, whose long life as an autistic adult reveals both extraordinary gifts and daily challenges. She traces the small “town” of family, carers and advocates who supported him from childhood through his final years, and reflects on how housing, work, medical care and […]
Across the Divide: Jewish & Arab Israeli Women
Peace activist Vivian Silver was one of many murdered in the Gaza Envelope on 7 October. Amid profound grief, her partners in peace have continued her work with Women Write Hope: Life Stories of Jewish and Arab Women Waging Peace Amidst War. We welcome two key figures behind this remarkable initiative: social changemaker Ghadir Hani, […]
The Lines We Draw: A Jewish Journalist’s Search for Identity
What does it mean to be Jewish? As a child in 1970s Birmingham, Tim Franks was a practising Jew with few relations and little sense of lineage. As the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent he was denounced both as a self-hating Jew and an Islamophobe. So he set out to trace his ancestral roots from Constantinople […]
The Einstein Vendetta
Subtitled Hitler, Mussolini and a True Story of Murder, Thomas Harding’s latest takes us to Italy in the summer of 1944. Villa Il Focardo is home to Robert Einstein, cousin of Albert, the world-famous scientist and a prominent enemy of the Nazi regime. Just 12 hours after a unit of German soldiers arrive, they have […]
Death in a Shallow Pond
Is letting people in the developing world die – when a small donation could save them – morally akin to saving our shoes instead of a drowning child? That was the stark claim of Peter Singer’s 1972 thought experiment. Widely criticised yet hugely influential, it reshaped debates on global poverty and helped inspire the Effective […]
Mel Brooks speaks with Alan Yentob
Hear Mel Brooks on his love of books. Alan Yentob and Mel Brooks© Anthony Wall, Anne Webber and the Estate of Alan YentobArena at Jewish Book Week