Events 2011
Tel Aviv Stories
06/03/2011 - 3:00 pm
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The film, Jellyfish, captures the hidden narratives of everyday Tel-Aviv life and draws a vision of the hundred-year old city which is both more seedy and ma...
Who Do We Think We Are?
06/03/2011 - 3:00 pm
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Journalists Gary Younge and Jeffrey Kaye wrestled with “identity” in this thought-provoking session. Younge assessed that identity politic...
The Balfour Declaration
06/03/2011 - 3:00 pm
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The story of the Balfour Declaration is a tale full of intrigue, betrayal, adventure, death and triumph. Jonathan Schneer shows English diplomats’ desperat...
Turbulent Times
06/03/2011 - 3:00 pm
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The Jewish people have always been a disputatious lot. In the contemporary British Jewish community, issues such as attitudes to Israel, antisemitism, Jewish...
An Unfinished Business
06/03/2011 - 2:45 pm
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Boualem Sansal is not afraid to tackle difficult topics. His novels, written in French, are banned in his own country, Algeria. An Unfinished Business is the...
The Punishment of Gaza
06/03/2011 - 2:45 pm
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He has been called “a propagandist for Hamas” by Israeli right-wingers but sees himself as a patriot who wants to be proud of his country. He told Johann...
Freud’s Escape from Vienna
06/03/2011 - 2:45 pm
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Freud escaped from Vienna with the help of a good Nazi Anton Sauerwald who in his spare time made bombs. In the book The Escape of Sigmund Freud David Coehn ...
Super Sad Love Story
06/03/2011 - 2:30 pm
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Put together one of America’s best novelists – the irreverent Russian-born Gary Shteyngart – and the only UK comedian who is an expert in Yiddish – t...
Peter Mandelson in conversation with Nick Cohen
06/03/2011 - 2:30 pm
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‘A compelling account of the New Labour years…nearly every page is illuminating.’ Steve Richards, Independent ‘A revealing and...
We Had It So Good
06/03/2011 -
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Linda Grant spoke to Joan Bakewell about her new novel, We Had It So Good, which takes us from the late 60s to today, following the lives of a group of frien...
Vasily Grossman
06/03/2011 - 2:15 pm
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Vasily Grossman is famous for his masterpiece Life and Fate and his writing as a reporter embedded within the Red Army, particularly for his powerful report ...
My Memories After Death
06/03/2011 - 2:15 pm
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The most popular Israeli journalist presented his latest book, a posthumous memoir of his father, the much loved and controversial politician Tommy Lapid. He...
A Rift In Time
06/03/2011 - 2:15 pm
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Raja Shehadeh’s uncle fled the Ottoman police, his family lost their prosperous home by the sea when Israel was created, his father was murdered and his ev...
JC Evening: Last Word
06/03/2011 - 2:00 pm
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The Finkler Question is the ‘first unashamedly comic novel’ to win the prestigious Booker Prize and flagrantly Jewish to boot. Howard Jacobson and Jonath...
Banking Then and Now
03/03/2011 - 3:45 pm
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With access to 10,000 letters and a wealth of previously unpublished material, Niall Ferguson’s compelling biography: High Financier: The Lives and Time of...
The Death of Eli Gold
05/03/2011 - 3:15 pm
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The Death of Eli Gold is a comedy, a thriller, and a meditation on love, death, aging, sex, America and fame. Inspired by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updi...
Berlin at War
04/03/2011 - 3:30 pm
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Roger Moorhouse’s bird’s eye-view of life in Berlin under Nazism using memoirs, diaries and interviews charts the violent humbling of a once-proud metrop...
Translating Anne Frank
04/03/2011 - 3:30 pm
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Most of Anne Frank’s readers come to her diary through a translation. How much has this affected our experience of this iconic piece of writing? How much i...
True Tales
05/03/2011 - 3:15 pm
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The totally true storytelling club returned for JBW 2011. We selected some of our favourite writers who revealed true moments of beauty, awkwardness, tragedy...
Film: Jellyfish
03/03/2011 - 3:45 pm
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Co-directed by Etgar Keret and his wife Shira Geffen – who also wrote the film – this small wonder won the Golden Camera prize at Cannes. Three stories a...
Workshop: Story by Bedtime
03/03/2011 - 3:45 pm
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This practical afternoon workshop got our JBW audience writing a bedtime story to read to their loved ones. They had the chance to explore some of the elemen...
The Arabs and the Holocaust
03/03/2011 - 3:30 pm
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Arab and Israeli reactions to the Holocaust differ naturally and are yet closely interconnected, as the Nazi genocide of the Jews has become the object of va...
Meet the Author
03/03/2011 -
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When his cousin was killed in the Zululand hills, journalist Kevin Bloom’s reporting of South Africa’s tempestuous social upheaval took on a deeply perso...
Clive James in conversation with Pascal Bruckner
02/03/2011 -
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Pascal Bruckner is not afraid of controversy. Original and unconventional, the author of The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism has garnered pra...
Haunting Memories and Fractured Identities
02/03/2011 - 10:30 am
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Two strikingly new voices came to JBW 2011, original and poetic, revisit the themes of loss and belonging, nourished by their own experiences. In Jenny Erben...
Silent Words
02/03/2011 - 10:15 am
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Johanna Adorjan and Merilyn Moos both grew up with vast areas of silence, things that could not be spoken about. Echoes of the holocaust linger into the sile...
I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
02/03/2011 - 10:15 am
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Narrated by Nicole Kidman, the film features interviews with Wiesenthal associates, government leaders from around the world, friends and family members. Pre...
Workshop: Find Your Poetic Voice
02/03/2011 - 10:15 am
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This was a practical writing workshop helping participants to get in touch with their poetic voices. Memories are essential ingredients for constructing poem...
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends
02/03/2011 - 10:00 am
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In his research for his biography of Simon Weisenthal, Tom Segev had access to previously unseen and recently declassified papers, rendering this the first f...
Workshops: The Afternoon Play
01/03/2011 - 11:00 am
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What is unique about the short form on stage? How do you capture something and distil it down to a few minutes? In this workshop, participants learnt and pla...
Refugee and Survivors Stories
01/03/2011 - 11:00 am
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Tony Grenville is the author of the first history of the refugees who fled to Britain from German-speaking lands, from their arrival in the mid-thirties, to ...
Flavours of Babylon
01/03/2011 - 10:45 am
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Following a screening of Sephardi Voices, in which seven Jewish men and women from Iraq, Egypt, Iran and Morocco tell their stories of coexistence and persec...
Films produced by the Association of Jewish Refugees
01/03/2011 - 10:45 am
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Both directed by Dr Bea Lewkowicz Moments and Memories (2005, 38 mins) This film highlights the memories and experiences of fourteen refugees and surv...
Great House
01/03/2011 - 10:30 am
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“[She] happens to write like an angel.” — Simon Schama Nicole Krauss mesmerised readers, critics and judges of literary prizes alike with The Hi...
Flash Fiction Writing Workshop
28/02/2011 - 11:15 am
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Flash fiction, micro fiction, short shorts: this is the short story distilled to its very essence, less than 1000 words in length and often much shorter. We ...
Poetry
28/02/2011 - 11:15 am
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Each of Ruth Fainlight’s poems is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday. She read from her New and Collected...
Eat, Write, Love
28/02/2011 - 10:30 am
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Recipe for a delectable and stimulating talk: take an award-winning novelist and a fabulous cookbook writer. Add a flavour of Jane Austen, equal doses of int...
Lives Remembered
28/02/2011 - 11:30 am
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Miriam Frank had to adjust to new countries and new languages before becoming a successful anaesthetist and respected translator. Prolific writer Rosemary Fr...
Arthur Miller Biography, Part 2
28/02/2011 - 11:15 am
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Backed by popular demand, Christopher Bigsby returned to JBW to talk to us about Arthur Miller from 1962 – the year of Marilyn’s death – to that of the...
Films
28/02/2011 -
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The Slow Mirror (22 minutes) The Slow Mirror is based on a short story by Jewish-American novelist Richard Zimler, who wrote the scre...
The Hare with Amber Eyes
28/02/2011 - 11:00 am
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The internationally acclaimed ceramicist, Edmund de Waal, retraced the history of his family through an inherited collection of netsuke – tiny Japanese fig...
Community Buildings: Building Community
27/02/2011 - 1:30 pm
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One of the causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment. Alain de Botton tells us about his new Living Architecture project, dedicat...
Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka
27/02/2011 - 12:45 pm
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Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was a religious Jew responsive to the challenge of Jewish secularism; Franz Kafka, a thoroughly secular Jew who loved the paradoxic...
The People and the Book: The Impact of the Printing Press on the Formation of Jewish Culture
27/02/2011 - 12:45 pm
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David Ruderman spoke about the momentous world events that shaped Jewish history in the early modern era. What did the discovery of America in 1492 have to d...
Fifty Year Reflections of a Jewish Historian
27/02/2011 - 12:30 pm
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With consummate skill, patience and brilliance in equal measure, Martin Gilbert has recounted most of the major events of the 20th century. His work encompas...
Anne Frank Revisited
27/02/2011 - 12:30 pm
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Buddy Elias, Anne Frank’s only surviving relative, told us about his cousin, as he remembers her. He was joined by Mirjam Pressler, who translated and edit...
33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs
27/02/2011 - 12:15 pm
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When pop music meets politics, the results are often thrilling, sometimes lifechanging and never simple. 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Song...
Maureen’s Monologues
27/02/2011 - 12:30 pm
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Maureen Lipman has the knack of making the everyday supremely entertaining, the ordinary absurd and unexpected. Her collection of pieces, I Must Collect Myse...
Translation and Survival
27/02/2011 - 12:00 pm
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Tessa Rajak offers a radical new understanding of the translation of the Torah into Greek – the first major translation in Western culture. Its significanc...
My Bookshelf, My Country: Understanding Israel through its Writing
27/02/2011 - 12:00 pm
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Anat Hoffman’s world is filled with demonstrations, vigils, courtrooms and confrontations in and out of parliament. Here she shared books that inspire, dir...
Jesus and the Jews
27/02/2011 - 12:00 pm
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Why is Jesus the source of fascination in modern Jewish thought? How has Christianity changed Jewish practice and how did Judaism shape the medieval imaginat...
How the Jew in Gustav Mahler changed the music of the West
27/02/2011 -
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Norman Lebrecht’s best-selling book Why Mahler? examines how a composer, scorned and rejected for decades, has come to replace Beethoven at the centre ...
Stefan Zweig: Words and Music
27/02/2011 - 12:00 pm
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With whom have we not spent heart-warming hours there, looking out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful landscape, without suspecting that exactl...
All About Eve
27/02/2011 - 11:30 am
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“To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong…to be a leader mea...
Bookniks Salon
26/02/2011 -
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A literary salon with a twist (or two). We discovered hidden Yiddish London, heard from the frontline of the ‘Sheitl-gate’ scandal and found out what hap...
Jerusalem, the Biography
26/02/2011 - 1:45 pm
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Who better to have opened JBW than a captivating and charismatic storyteller on the most iconic city of the world, the capital of three faiths, the prize of ...