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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
David Baddiel: The God Desire
After his record-breaking Jews Don’t Count event in 2021 David Baddiel returns to the festival with his latest bestseller The God Desire, described as “breathtaking” by Stephen Fry and “hugely heartfelt, funny, kind, fascinating, human and clever” by Alain de Botton. This thought-provoking and philosophical essay is written from his perspective as a reluctant atheist […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Laugh Lines- Helen Lederer & Sara Gibbs
Two hilarious writers for the page, stage and screen join us to discuss their careers and the importance of funny books. Absolutely Fabulous star Helen Lederer follows her novel Losing It with memoir Not That I’m Bitter, tracing her journey from child of a Jewish-Czech wartime refugee to, in the words of Dawn French, “the […]
Jewish Dimensions of the War in Ukraine
For centuries, Ukraine was at the centre of the Jewish world. It was the heartland of Hasidism, Zionism and modern Jewish literature, from Sholem Aleichem to Hayim Nahman Bialik. Ukraine was also a land of pogroms and antisemitism. Today, war-torn Ukraine has about 60,000 Jews, one of whom is the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. There […]