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Speakers: Niall Ferguson With access to 10,000 letters and a wealth of previously unpublished material, Niall Ferguson’s compelling biography: High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg took 12 years to write.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 […]
David Grossman & Melvyn Bragg
Speakers: David Grossman, Melvyn Bragg Bestselling and award-laden author David Grossman joins us live online from Israel to discuss his writing and latest novel More Than I Love My Life with broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg. His follow-up to International Booker Prize winner A Horse Walks Into A Bar, it focuses on a 90th birthday celebration […]
Fear of Black Consciousness
Speakers: Lewis Gordon, Dennis Davis Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black Existentialism, joins us live from the US to discuss his ground-breaking look at how racial identity is constructed and experienced through history, art, politics and popular culture. Described by Judith Butler as “a thinker whose reflections on race […]
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 […]
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 […]
Steven Isserlis on Bach
A unique insight into one of the greatest composers of all time, from a leading light of contemporary classical music, in a world-class concert hall. Acclaimed worldwide for his profound musicianship and technical mastery, cellist Steven Isserlis is also an author and broadcaster. In addition to a discussion of his latest book The Bach Cello […]