The Cairo Genizah
For a millennium the Jewish community of Old Cairo placed their old books and other writings, from marriage contracts and love letters, to children’s drawings and even drafts from the hands of Maimonides, in a genizah, or storeroom, of the Ben Ezra Synagogue. In 1896 Dr Solomon Schechter, a Talmudic scholar, was granted permission by […]
Being Jewish Today
Speakers: Tony Bayfield, Miriam Berger Scholar Tony Bayfield is a former Head of Britain’s Movement for Reform Judaism. Beginning with an account of the journey of the Jewish people and thought from ancient times to the present, Being Jewish Today explores Jewish identity and its relationship to Jewish tradition and belief. In conversation with his […]
Red Sea Spies
Speakers: Raffi Berg, Jenni Frazer BBC journalist Raffi Berg tells the true story of Mossad’s fake holiday resort on the Red Sea, a diving centre on the Sudanese coast run by secret service operatives. It attracted tourists from all over the world. In reality the agents used it as a cover to smuggle thousands of […]
House of Trelawney
Speakers: Hannah Rothschild, Lucy Silver Hannah Rothschild, writer, documentary filmmaker, business woman and philanthropist presents her deliciously funny new novel – at once a moving love story and dazzling social satire – set in the parallel and seemingly unconnected worlds of the British aristocracy and high finance. This is a story about old money, new […]
Spies of No Country
Speakers: Matti Friedman, Jenni Frazer In 1948, with Israel’s existence hanging in the balance, four men, part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, consisting of Jews native to the Arab world, went undercover in Beirut. Here, they spent the next two years operating out of a newsstand, collecting intelligence and sending messages […]
Vive La Résistance
Speakers: Fergus Butler-Gallie, Caroline Moorhead, Anne Sebba Wherever fascism has taken root, it has met with resistance. What drives people to such extraordinary courage? Fergus Butler-Gallie explores the lives of fifteen clergymen and women who fought fascism through acts of inventive heroism; whoever said that Christians had to be meek and mild hadn’t met Father […]
How to Fight Antisemitism
Speakers: Bari Weiss, Simon Schama, Julia Neuberger, Hugo Rifkind Antisemitism, says Bari Weiss, is ‘an ever-morphing conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil’; it is centre stage once more. It has existed for more than 2,000 years, the malignant prejudice that never dies. After the Holocaust there was a respite […]
A Thousand Small Sanities
Speakers: Adam Gopnik, Elif Shafak The journalist and New York Times-bestselling author Adam Gopnik offers a stirring defence of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, he shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history […]
The Language of Thieves
Speakers: Martin Puchner, Natasha Lehrer As a child The Written Word author Martin Puchner was told by his father about the secret code of Rotwelsch. A hybrid language associated with Jews and travellers, it blended Yiddish, Hebrew, Czech and other European languages, giving us expressions like ‘being in a pickle’. Unsettling many in power, no-one […]
What’s Next For Iran?
Speakers: Lawrence Freedman, Nazenin Ansari, Jack Straw, Sanam Vakil. In 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown. His replacement, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the birth of the Islamic republic of Iran. Today, ordinary Iranians live with an economy exhausted by sanctions and corruption, the media strictly controlled, and a hardline regime seeking to maintain its […]
The Wolf of Baghdad
“The belief is current among Baghdadi Jews that the wolf keeps away spirits and demons.” David Sassoon, scholar, 1917. Carol Isaac‘s graphic memoir of a lost homeland revisits the old Jewish Quarter of 1940s Baghdad, home to a third of the city’s population which witnessed the death or expulsion of almost its entire community of […]
Abram Games: His Wartime Work
Speakers: Naomi Games Captain Abram Games, holder of the unique title ‘Official War Poster Artist’, designed 100 posters for army use. In 1946 the War Office wrote of his work, ‘[it] was always effective, compelling, and of outstanding quality.’ His daughter Naomi Games tells the story of his wartime work.