Israel Now and Next
Three quarters of a century on, has Israel lived up to expectations? With the eyes of the world on the nation as never before, journalist and Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer asks two experts about its past, present and future. In The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel political scientist and election veteran Dahlia Scheindlin exposes […]
Collaboration & Complicity
The Nazis were assisted both by active collaborators and ordinary citizens failing to act, as two powerful new books show. In Bystander Society, historian Mary Fulbrook, drawing onan extraordinary archive of personal accounts, argues thatrather than what and when Germans knew, how they reactedwas key. In Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators […]
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 […]
Being Rina: The Collected Writings of Rina Wolfson
Rina Wolfson z”l was a gifted writer, whose writing made us laugh, learn, and cry. Writing on topics ranging from the parsha to parenting, from Talmud to chemotherapy, Rina’s work is a reminder of her inimitable voice.# Rina’s husband Paul Harris and son BZ Gilinsky, in conversation with journalist, author and Jewish Chronicle managing editor […]
Jewish Intimacies: Marriage, Love, Psychoanalysis
How do we understand and live with complex relationships such as love and hate, coexistence and conflict? How do ‘domestic’ relationships such as marriage endure, and how do we come to terms with deeply felt social antagonisms such as antisemitism and racism? On Marriage sees Feeling Jewish author Devorah Baum exploring why we marry and how this ancient, highly contested […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century
‘Far from being a fringe phenomenon, antisemitism is today an increasingly troubling presence in mainstream British society, especially in its often strident, anti-Zionist manifestations.’ Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Edited by David Hirsh, this multi-authored collection looks at the rise of antisemitism and antizionism since the millennium, principally in Britain. The director of the London Centre […]
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 […]
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 […]
Political Football: Beitar Jerusalem FC
The Israeli Premier League rarely makes global headlines in the way its counterparts do. That changed in 2020 with the news that a UAE royal was to take a 50% stake in Beitar Jerusalem FC, the only team in a league where all ethnicities co-exist never to have signed an Arab player, proclaimed by its […]
Jewish Unity through Diversity
Hen Mazzig, globally recognised advocate behind Mizrahi Heritage Month and The Wrong Kind of Jew author returns with Jewish Priorities essay An End to Ashkenormativity: Let’s put Bagels and Lox Jewishness Behind Us. He argues that the story of the Jews cannot be properly told without every Jewish community, not least the often neglected Mizrahi […]