London Lives
London’s oldest literary festival welcomes two of the most exciting new voices in fiction, discussing their stories from across the city and their writing journeys with This Green & Pleasant Land bestseller Ayisha Malik. Victoria Park, the debut novel from teacher Gemma Reeves, explores the lives of a dozen East End residents, with retired Jewish […]
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh
Famous for his unique method of creating films through controlled improvisations, Mike Leigh is the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (Secrets & Lies) and Venice (Vera Drake). In the updated Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, he reflects on a career that has established him as one of world cinema’s pre-eminent […]
Raymond Gubbay & Rob Rinder
Speakers: Raymond Gubbay, Rob Rinder From Yehudi Menuhin, Cab Calloway and Montserrat Caballé to Victor Borge, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Bolshoi Ballet, Raymond Gubbay has worked with the greats over the last six decades. Starting off aged 20 in 1966 with £50 borrowed from his father the theatrical impresario became synonymous with venues including […]
Simon Schama: Foreign Bodies
Speakers: Simon Schama, Julia Neuberger One of our most popular speakers returns with an exclusive event for the 70th anniversary Jewish Book Week, including a special preview of his next book, months before publication. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations looks at Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian Jew who created vaccines against cholera and the bubonic […]
The Father: A Revenge
Speakers: Franziska Frank, Philippe Sands Niklas Frank was just seven when his father Hans Frank, Hitler’s legal adviser and governor general of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. In the decades since he has attempted to come to terms with the enormity of the horror unleashed; The Father: A Revenge […]
The Lonely Century
Even before social distancing, loneliness was becoming the defining condition of the 21st century. But, argues academic and broadcaster Noreena Hertz, it is also one that we have the power to reverse. In her international bestseller The Lonely Century: A Call to Reconnect, she combines a decade of research with first-hand reporting, taking in smartphone […]
The Man From The Future
Smartphones; game theory; nanotechnology; nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born into a Jewish family in culturally dazzling fin de siècle Budapest, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived, reputed by his colleagues to have the fastest brain on the planet – […]
The Passenger
Written in the wake of Kristallnacht in a frenzied four weeks, 23-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s unbearably suspenseful and disturbingly prophetic posthumous novel recounts the plight of German Jewish businessman Otto Silberman, fleeing his home in the wake of the pogrom as he races to escape this homeland that is no longer a home. Writers Eva […]
The Sassoons
Speakers: Joseph Sassoon, Sara Manasseh One of the great commercial dynasties of the 19th century, the Sassoons were as eminent as traders as the Rothschild were bankers: a handful of Jewish refugees exiled from Ottoman Baghdad who forged a mercantile juggernaut trading cotton and opium, whose vast network of agents, informants and politicians bridged East […]
The Ticket Collector From Belarus
Speakers: Mike Anderson, Philip Rubenstein, Jon Silverman 1999 saw Britain’s first and only ever Nazi war crimes trial. The trial brought Andrei Sawoniuk – a retired ticket inspector, charged with murdering Jews during the Nazi occupation of Belarus – face to face for the first time in over 50 years with Ben-Zion Blustein, his former […]
Writers in Translation
Speakers: Sarah Death, Anna Blasiak, Femmetje de Wind, Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus In 2021 Jewish Book Week, supported by the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, held the second European Jewish Writers in Translation workshop. We are joined by a writer and a translator to discuss the process.
Claudia Roden & Jay Rayner
A unique chance to see two of the most influential figures in British cuisine and best-loved writers in conversation. 30 years after her first Mediterranean cookbook was published Claudia Roden, credited with revolutionising Western attitudes to Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food, returns to the topic. Called “a palpable instant classic” by Nigella Lawson, Med: A […]