Spark: How Genius Ignites
Speakers: Claudia Kalb, Harry Munt What are the origins of genius? How do luck, failure, personality and serendipity play into the arc of discovery? And why do some people reach extraordinary creative heights early in life while others achieve greatness decades later? New York Times bestseller Claudia Kalb joins us live from the US to […]
The Gift of the Gab
Speakers: David Crystal Linguist, writer, editor and broadcaster David Crystal on how eloquence works.
Lehrer, Dylan & Cohen
Music journalist and author of Genius & Anxiety Norman Lebrecht is joined by an illustrious trio to discuss the lyrics, lives and legacy of three of the greatest songwriters of all time – and play some songs. In Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius biographer and Jewish cultural expert Harry Freedman explores the sources […]
Banking Now and Then
Speakers: Niall Ferguson With access to 10,000 letters and a wealth of previously unpublished material, Niall Ferguson’s compelling biography: High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg took 12 years to write. Amassing a personal fortune of a mere £2,000,000, Warburg was not an exceptionally wealthy man even by the standards of his day, […]
Culture Wars: A Conversation
Speakers: Tracy-Ann Oberman, Bobby Duffy, Alex von Tunzelmann, Rafael Behr 150 years after ‘Culture War’ (Kulturkampf) was first used to describe the clash between church and state in Prussia, and three decades after sociologist James Davison Hunter popularised the term, we see the US embroiled in often-violent divisions and increasingly divisive debate here in the […]
Home Movie
Speakers: Caroline Pick, Susie Orbach A beautifully constructed film capturing the previously veiled story of artist and former BBC commissioning editor Caroline Pick’s parents’ lives in 1930s Czechoslovakia and her own childhood in 1950s Britain, Home Movie was shown to great acclaim at international film festivals around the world, as well as Jewish Book Week […]
Inside Stories
Speakers: Guy Leschziner, Bidisha, Alastair Santhouse A psychiatrist and a neurologist walk into a book festival. Not the start of a joke, but of a fascinating hour as two experts help us to make sense of the mind and to mind the senses. Radio 4 presenter and The Nocturnal Brain author Dr Guy Leschziner returns with The Man Who Tasted […]
In the Midst of Civilized Europe
Speakers: Jeffrey Veidlinger, Trudy Gold Between 1918-1921, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Poland by peasants, townsmen and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbours with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually […]
The Ottomans
Speakers: Marc David Baer, Katherine Pangonis Thanks in part to the Ottomans, for much of history Jews have had a positive image of Muslims. Acclaimed historian Marc David Baer charts the intimate relations between Jews and the Ottoman dynasty from the arrival of the expelled Iberian Jews in the fifteenth century to the end of […]
The Island of Extraordinary Captives
Speakers: Simon Parkin How did creativity flourish during one of our most shameful wartime missteps? In May 1940, faced with a country gripped by paranoia, Winston Churchill ordered the internment of all German and Austrian citizens living in Britain, around 30,000 in total, most of whom were refugees who had come to the country to […]
The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton
Speakers: Andrew Porwancher, Stuart Halpern This is the untold story of the founding father’s likely Jewish birth and upbringing—and its revolutionary consequences for understanding him and the nation he fought to create. For more than two centuries, Alexander Hamilton’s youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery, as he preferred, with most biographers assuming […]
On Tyranny
Speakers: Timothy Snyder, Jonathan Freedland Levin Professor of History at Yale Timothy Snyder joins us live from the US following the publication of a new graphic edition, with illustrations by Nora Krug, of his New York Times No.1 bestseller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. The winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize, the […]