Barbaric Verses
A musical refutation of Adorno’s dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, inspired by the creativity of composer Mieczysław Weinberg in the face of totalitarian brutality from both Hitler and Stalin. The programme also includes music by his Russian friends Dmitri Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the Ukrainian Boris Lyatoshynsky and the […]
Goodbye Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is disappearing. Not off the map, but as an idea. Today it can call to mind a jumble of post-Soviet states paved over with C&A and McDonald’s. It could be described as a group of 20 nations, but in Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land journalist Jacob Mikanowski asks […]
Norman Lebrecht on Beethoven
Beethoven was deaf and wrote a ringtone. That’s all most people know about him. His portrait is a scowl, his reputation anti-social. But is that the real Beethoven? Tracing the composer through two centuries of manuscripts and performance records, Norman Lebrecht finds that much of what we know about Beethoven is either warped, or plain […]
Meir Kahane: Jewish Radical
“Meir Kahane came of age amid the radical politics of the counterculture, becoming a militant voice of protest against Jewish liberalism. In the US he founded the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and then the ultranationalist KACH after his immigration to Israel in 1971, before his assassination in 1990. The incisive new biography from Dartmouth College […]
Adam Gopnik: The Mystery of Mastery
Decades of writing bestselling books and award-winning essays has seen Adam Gopnik take on myriad topics. But recently a question obsessed him: how did the people he was writing about learn their outlandish skill, whether it was drawing a nude or baking a sourdough loaf? In The Real Work the long standing New Yorker writer apprentices […]
Bad Jews
“You can be called a ‘Bad Jew’—by the community or even yourself—if you don’t keep kosher, don’t send your children to Hebrew school, or enjoy Christmas music; if your partner isn’t Jewish, or you don’t call your mother enough. But today, amid rising antisemitism, what makes a Good or Bad Jew is a particularly fraught […]
Jews & the Diamond Trade
From proposals and galas to James Bond and Uncut Gems, diamonds hold an indelible place in our culture. In A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting historian Saskia Coenen Snyder shows how diamonds travelled from South African mines to processing factories in Amsterdam to the necks of high society women in New […]
Muppets in Moscow
It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights…or is it? After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the timing seemed perfect to bring Sesame Street to millions of children across the former empire, with Jim Henson’s Muppet creations envisioned as ideal ambassadors for Western values, an idea championed […]
György Pauk: 80 Years with the Violin
Internationally acclaimed violinist György Pauk is regarded as the foremost living torch-bearer of the Hungarian Violin School, which traces its origins to the 19th century violinist Josef Joachim, a close friend and collaborator of Mendelssohn, the Schumanns and Brahms. With musical accompaniment from violinist Eriko Nagayama, the longstanding Professor of Violin at the Royal Academy […]
Encounters: Judaism & Orthodox Christianity
How can finite minds approach an infinite and ultimately unknowable God? Is it true that Christianity is a religion of love and Judaism a religion of law? How much do Jews and Orthodox Christians have in common when they worship God? What can be done about Christian prayers that Jews find offensive? How much responsibility […]
Britain’s Jews
Jews have lived in Britain longer than any other minority – so ingrained into the national fabric that they are often not considered to be a minority at all. And while there is a pervading sense of anxiety, as periodic outbursts of antisemitism or flare ups in the Middle East turn the spotlight on them, […]
2023 Keynote: Howard Jacobson
“With Jewish Book Week now into our eighth decade, Howard Jacobson, who has been speaking at the festival for almost half of our existence and predates us by just 10 years, delivers a specially created keynote: How the Jews Invented Disappointment. The Booker winner explains: “When asked to name what Jews were best at, I […]