The Art of the Thriller
At their best, thrillers can pull off the impressive feat of providing escape, while at the same time giving us food for thought on the world around us. That’s the case with the books here: former BBC journalist Alex Gerlis’sAgent in the Shadows ventures to wartime France as the Wolf Pack spies go undercover to […]
Genesis Emerging Writers 2024
The third edition of our Emerging Writers Programme in partnership with the Genesis Foundation culminates in this popular panel event, chaired by Bidisha Mamata. This year’s writers are: Sean Gilbert, Mariyam Karolia, Harriet Matthews and Susan Royston (fiction),Sharon Kanolik, Angus Reilly and Eleanor Thom(non-fiction); Beth Frieden, Michael Mullen and Evie Ward (poetry). Their mentors are: […]
Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau
Helen Rosenau was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history’s methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. Eighty years after the publication of what she termed ‘my little book’ – Woman in […]
Itamar Rabinovich: Middle Eastern Maze
A rare event with the former Israeli ambassador to the US and chief negotiator with Syria in the mid-1990s. In conversation with journalist David Aaronovitch, Itamar Rabinovich provides an insider’s analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict and peace process. His latest book Middle Eastern Maze covers the Abraham Accords, the new policies pursued by the Trump […]
Torah & Tradition in an Age of Doubt
Marcus du Sautoy: Around the World in 80 Games
Can pi help you win rock, paper, scissors? How did Mozart use maths to create music? And which is really the best property to own in Monopoly?These questions and many more are answered in Around the World in 80 Games by Oxford’s Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science Marcus du Sautoy. The Horizon […]
YIVO and the Recovery of Jewish Memory
Founded in 1925 in Berlin and Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) YIVO, or the Yiddish Scientific Institute, became the leading institution for scholarship in Yiddish. It was forced to move its HQ to New York in 1940. YIVO CEO and historian Jonathan Brent discusses with Philippe Sands the importance of the Institute for Jewish Research’s […]
Elif Shafak & Sarah Bernstein
Two of today’s most vital and highly regarded writers, together for the first time. 2023 saw author Sarah Bernstein named a Granta Best Young British Novelist and Booker shortlisted for Study for Obedience, the story of an unnamed Jewish woman’s move to the remote, unspecified country of her ancestors. And ahead of her highly anticipated […]
Burton & Taylor
It was one of the most iconic relationships of the 20th century, by turns triumphant and tragic, romantic and recriminative. Richard Burton emerged from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation; Elizabeth Taylor was the child actress turned Oscar winner, noted Jewish convert and much-married screen star. […]
Kindertransport and Beyond
85 years after the Kindertransport, children continue to flee their homes in search of safety. This special panel brings together expertise and personal experience spanning nine decades. Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines was one of 669 children rescued by Nicholas Winton from Czechoslovakia in 1939. In The Kindertransport: What Really Happened Dr Andrea Hammel explores some of the […]
Susan Rubin Suleiman- An Immigrant Girlhood
A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, Harvard professor Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee, aged five when the Nazis […]
The Last Consolation Vanished
On October 7 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz rebelled, bombing Crematorium IV. The desperate uprising was defeated by the end of the day, with over 400 prisoners killed, including Zalmen Gradowski. The Last Consolation Vanished: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz is the first full English translation of his extraordinary, powerful […]