Events 2015
The New Yorker
01/03/2015 - 8:00 pm
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New York symbolises the sweeping cultural changes of the 20th century and The New Yorker, first published in 1925, initiated many of these changes....
Judy Blume: In the Unlikely Event
12/07/2015 -
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Jewish Book Week was delighted to present the wonderful Judy Blume in a special event. Judy Blume spoke about her life in books and her brand new adul...
Meir Zamir and Michael Goldfarb on a Secret Anglo-French War
01/01/2015 - 8:00 pm
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In The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East 1940-1948, Meir Zamir uncovers an unknown Franco-Zionist intelligence collaborati...
How London Fell in Love with Middle Eastern Food
05/01/2015 -
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Yotam Ottolenghi is not alone: following his phenomenal success a group of talented Israeli and Jewish chefs are taking the London restaurant scene by storm....
Patrick Bishop: The Reckoning
05/01/2015 - 11:00 am
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As leader of the infamous Stern Gang, Avraham Stern fomented Jewish rebellion in Palestine against British rule. He was shot dead by a British officer on a c...
Going behind Closed Doors: Judging Book Prizes
05/01/2015 - 11:00 am
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Book prizes are almost as commonplace as book festivals. Shortlisted authors enjoy exposure and prestige and the winner tops it all with a substantial reward...
Deborah Treisman and Hadley Freeman
06/01/2015 - 5:00 pm
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As fiction editor of The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman is one of the most influential arbiters of literary taste on either side of t...
Caroline Pick and Lisa Appignanesi: Retrieving Lost Memories
06/01/2015 - 5:00 pm
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Caroline Pick’s Home Movie is a beautifully constructed film capturing the previously veiled story of her parents’ lives in 193...
An Interview with Howard Jacobson
05/01/2015 - 11:00 am
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Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson returns to Jewish Book Week to discuss his enigmatically titled novel J with John Mullan. The w...
Robert Mankoff: The New Yorker Cartoon
03/01/2015 - 3:15 pm
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The New Yorker cartoon is a unique and distinctive art form. Bob Mankoff, cartoonist and humourist, will demonstrate what makes thi...
Sarah Helm on Ravensbrück and David Cesarani on Germany 1933-49
03/01/2015 - 3:30 pm
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Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp with solely female occupants; today it is barely known. Sarah Helm has written the definitive...
Workshop on Graphic Novels
05/01/2015 - 3:30 pm
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Come and learn the secrets of creating comics from a team of celebrated graphic novelists. Bring your existing work and produce new work at the workshop. The...
George Prochnik: Reflections on Stefan Zweig and Exile
05/02/2015 -
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George Prochnik’s family fled Austria in the 1930s, at the same time as Stefan Zweig turned his back on Vienna for the last time. In T...
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen – One Night, Markovitch
05/02/2015 - 3:30 pm
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Together with Pushkin Press, Jewish Book Week is delighted to launch the English edition of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s One Night, ...
The Genius of Gershwin, a pre-festival performance
19/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Due to popular demand, Jewish Book Week have added a pre-festival performance of its opening night Gershwin event. In our specially c...
The Genius of Gershwin
21/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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In our specially commissioned two-act tribute to George and Ira Gershwin, we celebrate the wit and melodies of the brothers from Brooklyn who created some of...
Cherchez la femme
21/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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Lisa Appignanesi, Stephen Frosh, Eva Hoffman and John Launer discuss how sex became a sca...
Melnitz: a Sweeping Swiss Family Saga
22/02/2015 - 11:00 am
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Charles Lewinsky’s portrait of Swiss Jewish life in his ambitious and panoramic novel Melnitz bears an astonishi...
Jonathan Sperber and Jonathan Freedland reconsider Marx
22/02/2015 - 11:00 am
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Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life: Karl Marx has been hailed as “a brilliant em...
Jews and the Military
22/02/2015 - 11:00 am
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Jewish active involvement in the military is often perceived as a relatively new phenomenon, associated with the establishment and defence of Israel. ...
Eva Schloss: After Auschwitz
22/02/2015 - 12:30 pm
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Eva Schloss recounts the story of her long journey home after the liberation of Auschwitz and looks back at her family’s culturally rich l...
Mark Rothko: the Man and His Art
22/02/2015 - 12:30 pm
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Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkovitz, aka Mark Rothko, emigrated from the Russian Empire to the US aged 10 to become one of the most influential and original paint...
David and Ben Crystal: You Say Potato…
22/02/2015 - 12:30 pm
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Linguist David Crystal and his actor son Ben travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English. Witty, authoritat...
Gemma Levine: Life Behind the Camera
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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Gemma Levine presents her photographic memoir: Just One More…. With talent and verve, Gemma has photographed man...
The Jewish Parrot
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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The Jewish Parrot and Other Judeo-Spanish Tales is a unique book which combines striking illustrations with folk tales told in both...
Simon and Chloe Schama Unravel the Father-Daughter Bond
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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Biographer and journalist Chloe Schama dedicated her first book, Wild Romance, to her father “who taught me how to tell a story....
Frédéric Brenner: Israel through 12 Lenses
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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One country: 12 different worlds. For the first time in the UK, Frédéric Brenner presents his astonishing 12-monograph project of capturin...
Linda Grant, Julia Neuberger and Anne Sebba on a Lost Classic
22/02/2015 - 3:30 pm
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2015 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of GB Stern, the little-known, but influential author of The Matriarch...
Chaim Bermant Award for Journalism
22/02/2015 - 3:30 pm
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Maureen Lipman introduces The Chaim Bermant Award for Journalism, produced for Jewish Book Week 2015. The award is presented in memory of th...
If it’s Not Impossible… The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton
22/02/2015 - 11:00 am
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Nicholas Winton, regarded as Britain’s Schindler, was a young stockbroker in 1938 when he masterminded an operation to rescue 669 children from Nazi-occupi...
Jenny Erpenbeck and Doron Rabinovici
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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To Michael Faber, Jenny Erpenbeck is ‘one of the finest, most exciting authors alive.’ Her novel The End of Days...
Beyond the Vatican: Pope Francis and the Modern World
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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Jewish Book Week co-presents this event with the Council of Christians and Jews. Pope Francis’s rulings and decrees on religious and social issues a...
Andrew Solomon and Julia Neuberger: Far From the Tree
22/02/2015 - 11:00 am
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Celebrated psychologist Andrew Solomon’s multi-award-winning Far From the Tree: Parents Children and the Search for Identity...
Judah Passow, Kenneth Collins and Hugo Rifkind on the Jews of Scotland
22/02/2015 - 2:00 pm
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In Scots Jews: Identity, Belonging and the Future, photographer Judah Passow documents the life of Scotla...
Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind
22/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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In Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a whirlwind journey across 70,000 years of human existence. The array of humans who inhab...
Jeremy Robson and Maureen Lipman: Blues in the Park
22/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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Actress Maureen Lipman joins poet Jeremy Robson in reading from his powerful and witty new collection of poetry – ...
Synagogues at Risk? Why British Jews need Jewish Heritage
22/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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There is more to British Jewry than North London and the East End as Sharman Kadish’s expanded guidebook Jewish Heritage in Br...
Hermann Simon: Gone to Ground
23/02/2015 - 1:00 pm
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Gone to Ground is derived from the tape recordings Hermann Simon made of his mother, Marie Jalowicz Simon, who survived the Second ...
Suzanne Perlman: An Artist’s Life
23/02/2015 - 2:30 pm
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The intensity of Budapest-born Suzanne Perlman’s paintings matches that of her illustrious life. Now 91, her career has spanned many decad...
Jacqueline Rose and Helena Kennedy on Women in Dark Times
23/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Jacqueline Rose’s compelling new book opens with three extraordinary women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, German–Jewish painte...
Antony Lentin: the Rise and Fall of Sir Edgar Speyer
23/02/2015 - 7:30 pm
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Sir Edgar Speyer was a much admired US-born philanthropist who, among his many contributions, founded the Whitechapel Art Gallery, financed the construction ...
John Lahr: Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
23/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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John Lahr wasThe New Yorker ‘s renowned chief drama critic for over 20 years and is now a regular contributor. His masterly...
Peter Day and Henry Hemming on Unlikely Spies
23/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Our absorption in espionage stories has produced an explosion of heroes, books and films. This event is dedicated to two real-life spies, Klop Ustinov and Ge...
Bright Star in a Dark Chamber
23/02/2015 -
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Armed with relentless determination and biting wit, anti-apartheid legend Helen Suzman fought the white male establishment to form a groundbreaking human rig...
Elaine Feinstein: Portraits
24/02/2015 - 2:30 pm
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Elaine Feinstein has been an academic, a novelist, a playwright, a biographer and a translator, but it is for her poems that she is best-kno...
The Contemporary Art Scene
23/02/2015 -
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Experts in the contemporary art scene will elucidate how the global art market works and how artists ignore it at their peril. Georgina Adam...
The Language of Peace
23/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Raja Shehadeh, the award-winning human rights lawyer from Ramallah and author of Palestinian Walks, returns to Jewish Book Week to ...
Life on and off the Stage
28/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Jewish Book Week and the Jewish Music Institute together present a father-daughter conversation between theatre impresario Stephen Waley-Cohen...
Philosophy Bites
24/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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The Philosophy Bites podcast has been downloaded 23 million times (and rising), proving there is a huge appetite for philosophical exchange on topics such as...
Lyndall Gordon: Divided Lives
25/02/2015 - 1:00 pm
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Susie Orbach has called Lyndall Gordon a “biographer of soul”… This acclaimed biographer of Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Henry ...
Kenneth Marks: Jewish Archaeology
25/02/2015 - 2:30 pm
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Jews were readmitted to Britain by Cromwell in 1656. In just over a century their number grew from a mere handful of families to 60,000 residents, who mostly...
Caroline Moorehead and Edward Stourton: French Resistance
25/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets is a gripping and penetrating account of the villagers of Le Chambon-sur...
John Kampfner and Giles Fraser on The Rich
25/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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The super-rich inhabit a parallel world, competing with each other for power and influence. They mesmerise and horrify us in equal measure. But is this globa...
Martin Wolf and Mervyn King on the Economy
25/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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FT chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, and former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, discuss how far the g...
The Art of the Essay: Notting Hill Editions
25/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Michael Ignatieff, Phillip Lopate and Adam Mars-Jones celebrate the essay, the sine qua non of Notting H...
The Writer’s Craft
26/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Linda Grant and AD Miller, together with Charlotte Mendelson, discuss the creative process – how the...
A Bazaar Life: David Alliance and Ivan Fallon
26/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Ivan Fallon, former business editor of The Sunday Times and co-author of A Bazaar Life, talks to Liberal Democrat peer,...
The Art of Writing for Young Adults: a Workshop
26/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Writing for young adults is a genre of its own, prompting the challenges one might expect in creating enjoyable, age-appropriate, but trenchant works of fict...
Rachel Holmes on Eleanor Marx: A Life
26/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Rachel Holmes talks to Rachel Cooke about her critically acclaimed biography of Eleanor Marx. Marx’s favourite daughter w...
Peter Beinart and Jonathan Freedland on Israel and the Diaspora
26/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Voices have the power to sway public opinion and perhaps even determine policies. Peter Beinart, who writes for The Atlantic and...
Boris Bennett: East End Weddings
27/02/2015 - 1:00 pm
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Boris Bennett chronicled the major life events of Jewish East End families for over 25 years. His iconic photographs of East End weddings have been collated ...
The Betrayers
28/02/2015 - 7:00 pm
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Fresh from winning the National Jewish Book Award for his latest novel The Betrayers, Canadian author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis...
The King of Ivy League
28/02/2015 - 8:00 pm
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John Simons was one of the leading menswear designers in 1960s London, introducing the Ivy League look to young, fashion-obsessed Mods. A ne...
Roger Cohen, Michael Ignatieff and Simon Schama on Israel’s Future
28/02/2015 - 8:30 pm
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Last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas sharpened perceptions of the long-standing Israel-Palestine conflict. With an ever-more uncertain future ahead, ...
Steve Jones: Where Science Meets the Bible
01/03/2013 - 11:00 am
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Science and faith are often viewed as mutually exclusive, but both are concerned with life’s most profound mysteries. Steve Jones, the wor...
Roger Cohen: The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family
01/03/2015 - 11:00 am
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New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s memoir is an intimate and moving Jewish family history of displacement, prejudice, hope,...
Natalie Haynes: Stand Up for the Classics Natalie Haynes
01/03/2015 - 11:00 am
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Fêted comedian, broadcaster and writer Natalie Haynes takes you on a whistle-stop tour of Ancient Greece and Rome. If you’ve ever wondere...
AB Yehoshua: Lunchtime Lecture
01/03/2015 - 12:30 pm
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AB Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost writers and public intellectuals, considers how Jewish culture is now reflected through the prism of contemporary Isr...
Göran Rosenberg and Sigrid Rausing: A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
01/03/2015 - 12:30 pm
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Göran Rosenberg is in conversation with Granta’s Sigrid Rausing about his heart-stopping memoir of his father, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz. Th...
Jeremy Josse on Financial Paradoxes
01/03/2015 - 12:30 pm
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Contrary to its dull image, the financial world is actually full of strange and wonderful conundrums. In Dinosaur Derivatives and Other Trades, Jeremy Josse,...
The Art of the Graphic Novel
01/03/2015 - 2:00 pm
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Join leading Israeli graphic novelists Rutu Modan (The Property and Exit Wounds) and Yirmi Pinkus (Petty Business and Professor Fabrikant’s Historical Caba...
Assaf Gavron: The Hilltop
01/03/2015 - 2:00 pm
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Rich with humour and insight, hailed as “The Great Israeli Novel” (Time Out, Tel Aviv) Assaf Gavron’s prize-winning The Hilltop is a monumental and dar...