Howard Jacobson & Melvyn Bragg
Speakers: Howard Jacobson, Melvyn Bragg As Jewish Book Week celebrates its 70th anniversary one of the festival’s favourite speakers marks a milestone of his own as he turns 80 this summer. In Mother’s Boy, Howard Jacobson explores belonging and not-belonging, being an insider and an outsider, both English and Jewish. Full of his trademark humour, this much-anticipated […]
Gerald Jacobs & Julia Neuberger
Speakers: Gerald Jacobs, Julia Neuberger, Hephzibah Anderson Compared to their neighbours in North, East and West London, the Jewish communities on the other side of the river tend to be less discussed. Countering that we have Gerald Jacobs, literary editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and Julia Neuberger, Britain’s second-ever female rabbi. Jacob’s latest novel Pomeranski […]
Yellow Star, Red Star
Speakers: Agnes Kaposi, Philip Skelke Agnes Kaposi was born in Hungary the year before Hitler came to power and started school at the outbreak of World War II. The Holocaust killed many of her family, together with half a million Hungarian Jews, but a series of miracles and coincidences allowed her to survive. She worked […]
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 […]
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 Lost Café Schindler
Speakers: Meriel Schindler, Josh Spero Meriel Schindler spent most of her life dealing with her father Kurt, an often-impossible man who made extravagant claims about their family history. Were they really related to Franz Kafka, Oskar Schindler or Hitler’s Jewish physician Dr Bloch? And what really happened on Kristallnacht, the night that Nazis beat her […]
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 […]
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 […]