The Fire and the Bonfire
Celebrated artist Ardyn Halter, in conversation with art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen, offers a profound meditation on genocide, memory and art interwoven through three compelling journeys through time and place. From the dynamics of his relationship with his father, Roman Halter, to his work designing and creating stained-glass windows for the Rwandan National Genocide Centre, to […]
Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew
From a Catskllls comic to one of the few individuals to have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, Mel Brooks dominated 20th century American comedy. Now, as he approaches 97, the director of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein is the subject of the latest book in Yale’s Jewish Lives series. Jeremy Dauber’s Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew explores how Brooks’ American Jewish humour morphed from being solely […]
Translating Soviet Literature
Three of the leading literary translators from Russian to English – Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Bryan Keretnyk – join literary critic David Herman to discuss their most recent translations: Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal; Isaac Babel’s Of Sunshine and Bedbugs; and Yuri Felsen’s Deceit. From Jewish gangsters in Babel’s native Odessa and the catastrophic first months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union to a […]
The Relativity of Death: Eduard Shyfrin
Dr Eduard Shyfrin, founder of the Kabbalah of information, best-selling author of From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics has written extensively for the Jerusalem Post on a series of topics such as Torah, Theory of Creation, life and death, science and many more through the lens of […]
Landscapes of Silence
Celebrated anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes, from childhood in the Derbyshire attending Hebrew classes but sent to a C of E boarding school, to a kibbutz in Israel. Bewildered by the silence created by his concealed family history, he sought places of escape. It was […]
One Hundred Saturdays
With nearly a century behind her, Stella Levi never spoke in detail about her past, until Mighty Franks author & essayist Michael Frank visited her Greenwich Village apartment to ask about the Juderia in Rhodes, where she was part of a Sephardic Jewish community that was deported in its entirety to Auschwitz. In the resulting […]
The Abraham Accords
In 2017 Trump Organization chief legal officer Jason Greenblatt was appointed as an assistant to the President and special envoy to the Middle East. In the Path of Abraham is his inside account of the Peace to Prosperity Plan, a plan to resolve the discord between Israel and its neighbours. The result was the ground-breaking […]
Anglo Jewry: A History of Controversy
Over the last 300 years Britain’s Chief Rabbis have been attacked for being too orthodox, not orthodox enough or simply being resistant to change. David Latchman will discuss some of these controversies, detailed in his new book Ten Chief Rabbis which is based entirely on items in his unique collection of Anglo-Judaica.
Hope is a Woman’s Name
An indigenous Bedouin in a Jewish state and a fifth daughter in a patriarchal society, Amal Elsana Alh’jooj was a shepherd at the age of five. Always driven to pursue justice and equality, from her early teens she ran literary classes for women, marking the beginning of a lifelong career promoting policy change for Israel’s Bedouin. […]
Jonathan Freedland & Anthony Julius in conversation with Hadley Freeman
An insightful hour with three people who’ve reached the top of their fields. Solicitor Anthony Julius and Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, both deeply rooted in the Jewish community and the authors of acclaimed books, join author and Sunday Times journalist Hadley Freeman for a unique event to discuss their respective careers, how their work has shaped their identities, and how it has been informed […]
The Object of Jewish Literature
With the rise of digital media, the ‘death of the book’ has been widely discussed. But the physical object itself persists. Here, through the lens of materiality and objects, Barbara Mann tells a history of modern Jewish literature, from novels and poetry to graphic novels and artist’s books, offering a new frame for understanding how […]
The Disrupted Mind
Philopsopher Noga Arikha spent 18 months at the Pitié-Salpêtière hospital in Paris, studying what happens when the mind goes wrong – and how our physical experiences inform our identities. Weaving together stories of her subjects’ troubles, from Vanessa who wakes from a coma having forgotten ten years of her life to Thomas, who no longer knows […]