Israeli Fiction Today
The last decade saw Israel’s literary landscape not only lose luminaries Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, but the emergence of several exciting new voices. Sunday Times News Review editor Josh Glancy is joined here by two leading lights. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen won a National Book Award for her translation of Oz’s Between Friends, a Sapir Prize […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin
A beacon of liberal philosophy and vigorous defender of individuality, Isaiah Berlin was one of the great public intellectuals. Present at some of the pivotal events of the last century, crossing paths with luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Sigmund Freud, he declined to write an autobiography. Instead, in his final decade he chose to give […]
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 […]
Hadley Freeman: Good Girls
From 80s movies, fashion and life advice to her family memoir House of Glass and writing for The Guardian and now the Sunday Times, Hadley Freeman has won global acclaim for her engaging combination of personal experience with journalistic skills. Praised by the Wall Street Journal for “sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humour”, Good […]
Sacks, Greenberg & the Quest for Orthodox Pluralism
A new model for acceptance between religions requires not only a willingness to move beyond hostility or competition, but also significant theological rethinking. The reigning paradigm is one of practical collaboration rather than reflection. Two of the most important Orthodox Jewish voices advocating change have been those of rabbis Irving Yitz Greenberg and Jonathan Sacks. […]
Frederic Raphael – Last Post
Over 20 novels; biographies of Byron and Josephus; radio plays; translations; short stories; screenplays directed by John Schlesinger, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Mazursky… Frederic Raphael’s trademark is versatility and it’s on show in Last Post, part-epistolary-memoir, part-prosopography. Alongside stories of Wittgenstein, Somerset Maugham and George Steiner, the Darling Oscar-winner offers loud salutes, occasional raspberries and […]
What is Jewish History For?
Few of us study Jewish history, yet so many of us would like to know more. Where and how is Jewish History to be taught? Most teaching of Jewish History in Europe and the United States concentrates on calamities – such as the pogroms and the Shoah – and these are often taught without context. […]
Art Monsters
For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is a landmark intervention from Lauren Elkin in how […]
Book Week 24 Keynote: Simon Schama
As we launch Book Week and the Jewish Literary Foundation to continue the journey we started 72 years ago with Jewish Book Week, who better to feature in our keynote than Sir Simon Schama? A regular at the festival for many decades, both as a sell-out speaker and avid audience member, this special event will reflect […]