Events 2017
An Exclusive Interview with James Rubin
25/02/2017 - 7:00 pm
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James P Rubin was a senior media advisor to Hilary Clinton in the latter part of her election campaign. An analyst, consultant and commentator on internation...
Comedy Question Time
25/02/2017 - 8:30 pm
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The ebullient Dan Patterson, co-creator of Mock the Week, presents an evening of irreverent entertainment. Dan and the audience pose the questions. Hugh Denn...
The Friendship of Joyce and Svevo
05/03/2017 - 6:30 pm
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James Joyce and Italo Svevo met in Trieste in 1907 when Joyce was Svevo’s English teacher at the Berlitz School. Their friendship endured the political and...
Burn Mark: A Photographic Memoir of the Six Day War
05/03/2017 - 6:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
This extraordinary work, assembled in 1968 by Avner Offer – Oxford Professor of Economic History and a former soldier in the Six-Day War – is now publish...
Not chosen
05/03/2017 - 6:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
Giles Fraser, priest, columnist, broadcaster and educator talks to Richard Harries about his upbringing as the child of a Christian-born mother and Jewish-bo...
The Left’s Jewish Problem
05/03/2017 - 5:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
In his thought-provoking new work, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, Dave Rich offers a judicious analysis of the Left’...
Have I Got A Story For You…
05/03/2017 - 5:00 pm
Kings Place, St Pancras
The renowned émigré newspaper, The Forward, was founded in New York at the end of the 19th century. Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief is written in an illustr...
Voices from Pinterland
05/03/2017 - 5:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
An exhilarating event featuring 17 early works by Harold Pinter, comprising his essays, sketches and radio plays, displaying the variety and wit of Pinter’...
Midrash Unbound: Transformations and Innovations
05/03/2017 - 3:30 pm
Kings Place, St Pancras
Professors Joanna Weinberg and Philip Alexander with Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün discourse on the Midrash. Covering a broad range of texts, from late antiquity to...
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story
05/03/2017 - 3:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
In an astute and moving exposé of war’s futility – part memoir, part reportage – award-winning writer and journalist Matti Friedman, in conversation w...
The Curse of Cash
05/03/2017 - 3:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
One of the world’s leading economists, Harvard Professor and chess grandmaster, Kenneth Rogoff, makes a persuasive case for ridding the world of high value...
Dora’s Story
05/03/2017 - 2:00 pm
Kings Place, St Pancras
Dora’s Story is a tale of triumph over every possible adversity – a story of terror and hunger and persistence. Dora Reisser, who made her way from Sofia...
Feisty Fictions
05/03/2017 - 2:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
Linda’s Grant’s sparkling new novel, The Dark Circle, is set in 1950, two years into the NHS, revolving around a TB sanatorium in the Kent countryside, w...
A Forger’s Life
05/03/2017 - 12:30 pm
Kings Place, St Pancras
This is the gripping true story of Adolfo Kaminsky who, narrowly escaping deportation to Auschwitz, was recruited as a teenager to join the Jewish undergroun...
Russian America and American Russia
05/03/2017 - 12:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
Boris Fishman and Sana Krasikov, originally from the former USSR, are two of America’s finest writers of fiction. Boris Fishman, author of the critically a...
Lady Antonia Fraser: A little-known chapter in her life with Harold Pinter
05/03/2017 - 12:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
In May 1978, the award-winning biographer Lady Antonia Fraser and celebrated playwright Harold Pinter boarded a flight destined for Tel Aviv. Antonia Fraserâ...
Testaments to Constancy and Change
05/03/2017 - 11:00 am
Kings Place, St Pancras
In Weatherland, Alexandra Harris’s subject is not the weather itself but the weather as it is daily recreated in the human imagination. She builds her rema...
How Game Theory, Strategy and Probability Rule Our Lives
05/03/2017 - 11:00 am
Kings Place, Hall 2
Using a grand piano as his prop, Haim Shapira explores the interplay between happiness and game theory in his contemplation of an eclectic range of theories....
Fiction of Guilt and Identity
05/03/2017 - 8:00 pm
Kings Place, St Pancras
John Steinberg’s Blue Skies Over Berlin is a moving and thought-provoking book about guilt and identity, featuring a young German woman who moves to London...
The Wild West: Boom or Bust?
04/03/2017 - 8:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
The arrival of President Trump and the threat of Europe’s so-called alt-right are already having far-reaching implications around the world. Our panel ...
A Day in the Life of the Brain
02/03/2017 - 8:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
Baroness Susan Greenfield outlines her profound yet straightforward theory about how each of us experiences and evolves an entirely personal view of the worl...
Daniel Finkelstein and Jonathan Freedland in conversation
02/03/2017 - 8:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
Sponsored by the Kennedy Leigh Charitable Trust Finkelstein and Freedland are two of the UK’s most brilliant social and political commentators: ...
Alan Greenspan: The Man Who Knew
02/03/2017 - 7:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
Winner of the 2016 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, Sebastian Mallaby’s biography of this titan of finance brilliantly renders the subtle...
Sailing to Byzantium
02/03/2017 - 7:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 1
Istanbul has always been a place where stories and histories collide and crackle. In her epic new biography, Istanbul, Bettany Hughes takes us on a dazzling ...
A History of Pictures from the Cave to the Computer Screen
01/03/2017 - 8:30 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
Juxtaposing a rich variety of images Martin Gayford, in conversation with Jan Dalley, arts editor of the FT, offers a dazzling and original account of art hi...
The Archive Thief
01/03/2017 - 7:00 pm
Kings Place, Hall 2
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski appropriated tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin and, later, fro...
Men of the World; Men of the Word
02/03/2017 - 2:30 pm
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Mr Justice Barrington Black was one of the UK’s best-known criminal defence lawyers. His old brother-in-arms, journalist and broadcaster Michael Freedland,...
Rabbi, I have a Problem
02/03/2017 - 1:00 pm
, JW3
Bring all your questions, puzzles and dilemmas for the experts to grapple with in a truly interactive event. The JC’s Rabbinic authorities – Naftali Braw...
Five Ideas To Fight For
01/03/2017 - 7:00 pm
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Five Ideas to Fight For is a revealing account of the tortuous struggles to secure the establishment of our rights and freedoms in law. Anthony Lester was at...
Power and Pragmatism
01/03/2017 - 8:30 pm
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Sir Malcolm Rifkind talks to broadcaster Iain Dale about his absorbing life-story. During his glittering political career he served as a Cabinet Minister thr...
Spitalfields: The History of a Nation in a few Streets
01/03/2017 - 7:00 pm
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Religious strife, civil conflict, waves of immigration, the rise and fall of industry, great prosperity and grinding poverty – the handful of streets that ...
The Allegations
28/02/2017 - 7:00 pm
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Derived from his personal experiences at the BBC, Mark Lawson’s new novel is a page-turning satire on the aftershocks of damning allegations. Penetrating, ...
Introducing Barbara Honigmann
01/03/2017 - 2:30 pm
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Barbara Honigmann is Germany’s foremost Jewish writer and the recipient of multiple awards. Author, journalist, theatre director and artist, her work explo...
Dispatches from the Kabul Cafe
01/03/2017 - 2:30 pm
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Canadian-born foreign correspondent Heidi Kingstone has interviewed many key international figures, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Zaha Hadid to Daniel Liebeskin...
The Refusal to be Vanquished
28/02/2017 - 2:30 pm
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Refusing to be defined by the tragic events of WW2, two remarkable women reveal their inimitable life stories. Patron of the Arts Rosa Lipworth and Dorit Oli...
Maureen Lipman On & Off the Stage
28/02/2017 - 1:00 pm
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Maureen Lipman is a magnet on stage, drawing all eyes to her. A woman of many gifts, Maureen also has an active professional life offstage as both writer and...
Perpetrators and their Victims
27/02/2017 - 2:30 pm
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In Jerzyk, Anthony Rudolf recounts the tragic story of his cousin, the only child suicide recorded in the archives of Yad Vashem. In Kasztner’s Crime, Paul...
My Dear Ones
27/02/2017 - 8:30 pm
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Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg interweaves the story of his family during the 1930s and 40s with the tragic unfolding of events in WW2 Europe. In a beautifully wr...
Worth Dying For?
28/02/2017 - 7:00 pm
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One of the finest geopolitical analysts of our day, bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall, examines the relationship between flags, nati...
Hot Fiction
27/02/2017 - 8:30 pm
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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk explores the strange and sometimes monstrous nature of womanhood through the opposing figures...
Is this the Asian Century?
27/02/2017 - 8:30 pm
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In conversation with China expert, Jonathan Fenby, Oxford Professor of Modern China, Rana Mitter, and economist and broadcaster, Linda Yueh, the FT’s Gideo...
In Praise of Forgetting
27/02/2017 - 7:00 pm
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David Rieff poses hard questions about whether remembrance has – or indeed ever could – inoculate the present against repeating the crimes of the past. C...
Fathers, Sons and Autism
26/02/2017 - 8:00 pm
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Funny and moving in equal measure, Jem Lester’s Shtum and Keith Stuart’s A Boy Made of Blocks reflect the authors’ personal experiences with their auti...
Roman Vishniac Rediscovered
26/02/2017 - 8:00 pm
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In a richly illustrated talk Maya Benton presents Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, featuring the full range of his artistic genius. In addition to his iconic ima...
Jewish Venice
26/02/2017 - 8:00 pm
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Shaul Bassi masterminded the events in the summer of 2016 to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Venetian Ghetto, including the production in Italian...
Aleppo
26/02/2017 - 6:30 pm
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Philip Mansel chronicles the history of Syria’s first capital city, vividly describing Aleppo as a pinnacle of cultural and economic power. Few places are ...
The Nobel Factor
26/02/2017 - 6:30 pm
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Our confidence in markets comes from economics, and our confidence in economics is underpinned by the Nobel Prize in Economics, first awarded in 1969. Avner ...
What’s the point of a Library in the Digital Age?
26/02/2017 - 5:00 pm
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What are the challenges and opportunities for libraries in the 21st century? Can they offer anything more than cafés with free Wi-Fi? Director of the Britis...
Howard Jacobson On The Writing Of Howard Jacobson
26/02/2017 - 5:00 pm
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Howard Jacobson writes with his customary thunder, passion and peerless wit in his latest collection of journalism, The Dog’s Last Work (and other Pieces)....
Till We Have Built Jerusalem
26/02/2017 - 3:30 pm
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Adina Hoffman’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a stunning rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement. A biographical excavation of one of...
Margaret Thatcher And The Middle East
26/02/2017 - 5:00 pm
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Azriel Bermant’s Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East presents a fresh analysis of Britain’s role in the Middle East, based on recently declassified pap...
Literary Espionage
26/02/2017 - 3:30 pm
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Sweeping and exhilarating, brimming with passion and betrayal, the new works of two well-known writers are compelling page-turners. In her debut novel, A Qui...
Powerful Intergenerational Love Stories
26/02/2017 - 2:00 pm
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Sarit Yishai-Levi’s dazzling The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is a bestselling novel of stories told and untold, following four generations of a Jerusalem Sep...
Jews of Ireland
26/02/2017 - 12:30 pm
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Through their respective works of fiction and poetry, Ruth Gilligan and Simon Lewis tell haunting stories of Ireland’s once-thriving Jewish communities....
Border Love
26/02/2017 - 12:30 pm
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Claire Hajaj’s assured and ambitious debut Ishmael’s Oranges and Dorit Rabinyan’s prizewinning All the Rivers are spellbinding novels exploring the fau...
All Who Go Do Not Return
26/02/2017 - 3:30 pm
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Shulem Deen’s award-winning book offers a moving and illuminating exploration of the highly secretive world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, bravely tracing one ...
Is Anything Happening?
26/02/2017 - 2:00 pm
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In this highly personal memoir, both funny and poignant, Robin Lustig describes a career spanning more than 40 years, from his childhood as the son of German...
Symbolic Bodies: Hands and Hair
26/02/2017 - 11:00 am
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Darian Leader and Emma Tarlo unveil some of the mysteries of our bodies. Psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why is a fascina...
Yitzhak Rabin
26/02/2017 - 12:30 pm
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Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman recounts Rabin’s foreshortened life, from his childhood in Tel Aviv in the 1920s through his military and politic...
The Women of Paris
26/02/2017 -
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Anne Sebba’s compelling new book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, investigates the lives of women in this most ...
East West Street
26/02/2017 - 4:00 pm
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In a last-minute change to the advertised event, Philippe Sands discusses his book East West Street and the images that were significant in its writing. ...
What Language Do I Dream In?
26/02/2017 -
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Elena Lappin’s life as a multiple emigré could be described as ‘five languages in search of an author’. Russian, Czech, French, German, Hebrew and Eng...
It’s Written In Our Genes
27/02/2017 - 7:00 pm
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In A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford tells the story of you and how you came to be. In every one of our genomes we carry the histor...