The Jewish Roots of Punk
40 years after it first emerged from the New York underground scene, the Punk movement continues to excite and inspire. “Professor of Punk” Vivien Goldman has brought together Geoff Travis, Daniel Miller, Charles Shaar Murray and Toby Mott to discover a less well-known side of the movement, the stories of the many Jews among its […]
David Grossman & Ian McEwan: Falling Out of Times
Israel’s celebrated author David Grossman author returned to Jewish Book Week to discuss Falling Out of Time, an exploration of parental bereavement, with fellow writer Ian McEwan. In a small village, in a kitchen, a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son. The […]
Irving Finkel: The Ark Before Noah
Speakers: Irving Finkel British Museum curator Irving Finkel launches his book The Ark Before Noah.
Reading Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg 100 years on
Speakers: Daljit Nagra, Peter Kananagh, Jean Moorcroft Wilson Some of the most haunting poems of the First World War were written by Jews. In this special event for Jewish Book Week London secondary school students performed selected works by Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg – one a gentleman officer who survived to be celebrated in […]
Ruby Wax: Sane New World
The comedian and “poster girl for mental illness” Ruby Wax launches the paperback of Sane New World, a manual for living with less everyday frenzy, in conversation with bestselling author Kathy Lette. Drawing on her experience of depression and study of neuroscience, Wax explore how the mind works. Everyone can rewire their thinking, she argues, […]
Speak, Old Parrot
Speakers: Danny Abse, Jeremy Robson, Diana Hoddinott Poet Dannie Abse returned to Jewish Book Week with a new collection for his 90th Birthday year on love, medicine, the passing of time and Jewish folk tradition. At its autobiographical heart is a vision of human possibilities, a delight in things seen and achieved and an awareness […]
The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2014
Speakers: Emily Kasriel, Josh Cohen, Jeremy Gordon, Rachel Lasserson, Catherine Taylor A lively discussion about the difficulties – and joys – of judging a completely disparate group of fiction and non-fiction books submitted for the prestigious £4,000 JQ Wingate Prize. Shortlisted books: Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman (Pushkin Press) Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death […]
Art and Fashion: The Legacy of Erwin Blumenfeld
Speakers: Yorick Blumenfeld, Helen Adkins, Francis Hodgson The impact that the legendary German-born photographer had on the fashion world is felt to this day but Erwin Blumenfeld’s range as an artist went well beyond his groundbreaking Vogue covers. Yorick Blumenfeld, Erwin Blumenfeld’s son, and art historian and Blumenfeld expert Helen Adkins explore the turbulent life […]
Julie Burchill: Unchosen
At 14 Julie Burchill fell in love. Not with a boy, but “with a whole race of people – the Jews”. The journalist and novelist has been learning Hebrew and even chose Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, as her single record choice for Desert Island Discs. Unchosen, which will be published in spring 2014 through […]
Otto Dov Kulka and Simon Schama Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death
Speakers: Otto Dov Kulka, Simon Schama Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death is a memoir of astounding literary and emotional power, exploring the permanent and indelible marks left by the Holocaust and a childhood spent in Auschwitz. As one of the few survivors he has spent much of his life studying Nazism […]
William Klein in conversation with Alan Yentob
Speakers: William Klein, Alan Yentob The influential photographer, painter and filmmaker comes to Jewish Book Week to discuss his career and life with Alan Yentob. Klein (American, born 1928), the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012, is known for his evocative street photography, pioneering fashion photography and experimental filmmaking.
Robert Harris: An Officer and A Spy
An Officer and a Spy is Robert Harris’s compelling recreation of the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal that became the most famous miscarriage of justice in history. Compelling, too, are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, […]