The Box with the Sunflower Clasp
Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent and a cigarette in her hand. But in her will she left her niece an intricately carved Chinese box. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daniel Finkelstein
The instant Sunday Times bestseller Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad is Daniel Finkelstein’s deeply moving and at times horrifying family memoir. His mother Mirjam, the youngest daughter of Alfred Wiener, was sent to starve in Bergen-Belsen. His father Ludwik was deported to Siberia as a slave labourer, surviving the freezing winters in a tiny house […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dickens’ Jews
In 1854, long before Jews Don’t Count, The Jewish Chronicle asked of Dickens, why “Jews alone should be excluded from the sympathising heart of this powerful friend of the oppressed.” Helena Kelly follows her acclaimed Jane Austen: Secret Radical with The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens. She joins us to focus on his relationship […]
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 […]
Mine is the Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets of Immanuel of Rome
Poet, biblical commentator and satirist Immanuel ben Shelomo, known as Immanuel of Rome, was the greatest Hebrew poet of medieval Italy. A contemporary of Dante’s, the beauty of his writings has fascinated scholars for over six centuries. Yet unlike Dante, he has not become a household name. For the first time, scholar and translator Yehudah […]