A Jewish Promised Land in Texas
‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy’ – Israel Zangwill, 1906. Rachel Cockerell joins historian Trudy Gold to reveal the astonishing moment when 10,000 Russian Jews fled to Texas before WWI – led by Cockerell’s great-grandfather, and the novelist Israel Zangwill. It was part of a search for an […]
Shylock’s Venice
There is nowhere in the world like Venice. With a history as remarkable as its beauty, millions explore the canals, palazzi – and its greatest shame. With the city corner where its Jews were exiled, Venice gave the world the word ghetto. But when it came to culture the ghetto walls were porous, as European […]
The Jewish Revolt
From 1940 historian Emanuel Ringelblum led a team of dedicated writers secretly recording Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto for what became known as the Oyneg Shabes archive. Among them, Rachel Auerbach was an eyewitness of 1943’s ghetto uprising. Her account has now been translated into English for the first time alongside her renowned essay […]
Herod: Jewish King in a Roman World
A History of Judaism author Martin Goodman returns with a vivid account of the political triumphs and domestic tragedies of Herod, the phenomenally energetic ruler who took advantage of the chaos of the Roman revolution. Both Jews and Christians developed myths about his cruelty; cast as the tyrant who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents […]
Thomas Harding on George Weidenfeld
Arriving in London in 1938 as a penniless, teenage Austrian-Jewish refugee, George Weidenfeld went on to transform publishing, championing Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Saul Bellow, Edna O’Brien, Isaiah Berlin, Golda Meir and many more. Thomas Harding, the internationally bestselling author of Legacy and Hanns & Rudolf, returns to the festival to discuss The Maverick, the […]
Bruno Schulz: Art, Murder & the Hijacking of History
Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. Without moving he was a subject of the Habsburgs, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR and, finally, the Third Reich. But the artist and man described by Isaac Bashevis Singer as “one of the most remarkable […]
Baruch Spinoza: A Life
One of Judaism’s most controversial figures, Baruch Spinoza was a radical free thinker led by strong moral principles despite his disbelief in an all-seeing God. Seen by many as Satan’s disciple during his life, he has been regarded as a secular saint in death. Many contradictory beliefs have been attached to him: liberalism, despotism, atheism, […]
Mifleget Hamachshavot Live
Where better to have the first-ever English-language edition of international hit politics podcast Mifleget Hamachshavot: The Great Ideas Behind Israel Politics than at Kings Place, home to the London Podcast Festival, and during Book Week? With 3.5 million downloads, philosopher and bestselling author Micah Goodman and lawyer and broadcaster Efrat Shapira Rosenberg bring one of […]
Einstein: A Life in 99 Particles
His name today is shorthand for genius. But Albert Einstein was also a refugee, a rebel, a Casanova, a pacifist and a high school dropout. In his unique biography Einstein In Time And Space, TLS science editor Samuel Graydon brings one of the last century’s most iconic and influential figures back to life, from escaping […]
Family Stories, Jewish History
Two astonishing books, at once intimate family stories and epic explorations of European Jewry, asking how the Shoah happened and why, nine decades on, antisemitism is resurgent. In Burgenland, David Joseph covers the full arc of the Jewish experience in central Europe over the last 300 years, with particular reference to an Austrian farming village […]
Israelophobia
In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 20th century, they were hated because of their race. Today, Jake Wallis Simons argues in his new book of the same name, antisemitism has morphed into something both ancient and modern: Israelophobia. But how did this transformation occur? And why? Called “excellent and […]
Music of Exile
How did composers and musicians persecuted by Hitler go on to shape the soundscape of the last century? Some fled Germany, navigating xenophobia and entirely different creative terrain. Others were forced to create under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos. In The Music of Exile Michael Haas sensitively records the story of […]