Events 2014
Gary Shteyngart Little Failure
02/03/2014 - 8:00 pm
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Little Failure Ð the alarming pet-name given to the young Gary Shteyngart by his father when growing up in pre-Glasnost Russia Ð is a remarkable immigrant ...
Film Double-Bill: Lea Goldberg and Yona Wallach
02/03/2014 - 6:30 pm
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Israeli filmmaker Yair Qedar comes to Jewish Book Week for the UK premiere of two documentaries, The Five Houses of Lea Goldberg (2011) and The Seven Tapes (...
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young on Disraeli
02/03/2014 - 6:30 pm
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In Disraeli or, The Two Lives former foreign secretary...
Andrew Hussey The French Intifada
02/03/2014 - 6:30 pm
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Beyond the affluent centre of Paris a guerrilla war is ablaze between the secular French state and the former subjects of its Muslim North African colonies. ...
Gideon Lewis-Kraus A Sense of Direction
02/03/2014 - 5:00 pm
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“If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus”,...
Clive Sinclair Death and Texas
02/03/2014 - 5:00 pm
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The stories in Clive Sinclair’s fourth collection range from ...
Claudia Roth Pierpont Roth Unbound
02/03/2014 - 3:30 pm
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Philip Roth has produced some of the greatest literature of the 20th century, yet there has been no major critical work about him to date. Now, for the first...
Claudia Roden The Food of Italy
02/03/2014 - 5:00 pm
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Tuscany has never been closer to King’s Cross. Claudia Roden, a sell-out speaker at the festival with ...
Mark Dapin Spirit House
02/03/2014 - 2:00 pm
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David is 13 and confused. His mum has gone off with her lover and sent David to his grandparents to give her new relationshp some “space”. David’s ...
Gianni Picco and Gabrielle Rifkind The Fog of Peace
02/03/2014 - 2:00 pm
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Peacemaking challenges every fundamental idea that we hold. Why should we talk to the enemy? What happens if people are nasty and brutish and we want to reta...
Adam Foulds and Sheila Heti Multiples
02/03/2014 - 2:00 pm
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Two young novelists discuss an extraordinary literary relay game in which dozens of writers have a go at translation, the thread of a story passing from cult...
Jane Rogoyska Gerda Taro and photojournalism
02/03/2014 - 5:00 pm
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Pioneering photographer Gerda Taro died in combat in the Spanish Civil war, aged 26. She did not live to see her partner Robert Capa become the world’s mos...
The Talmud The book that shaped Judaism
02/03/2014 - 11:00 am
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The Talmud is a repository of centuries of rabbinic wisdom on law, legend and life, with a dialectic structure setting it apart from virtually any other text...
Keiron Pim and Miri Rubin Medieval Norwich
02/03/2014 - 11:00 am
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How was life for Jews in medieval England? Recent scholarship and a groundbreaking new translation of Hebrew poetry from Norwich shed light on a d...
Joseph Rykwert on Louis Kahn
02/03/2014 - 11:00 am
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2014 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of American architect Louis Kahn, whose projects were considered as important as those of Le Corbusier or Mies v...
Ari Shavit: Israel and the Diaspora
01/03/2014 - 9:00 pm
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In My Promised Land, Israeli author and journalist Ari Shavit writes about his country with both love and misgiving. In this additional event ̵...
The Jewish roots of Punk
01/03/2014 - 9:00 pm
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40 years after it first emerged from the New York underground scene, the Punk movement continues to excite and inspire. “Professor of Punk” Vivie...
Mark Lewisohn on The Beatles
01/03/2014 - 7:30 pm
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Mark Lewisohn is the independent historian of The Beatles, who is working on a three-volume history, All These Years. ...
Sheila Heti How Should a Person Be?
01/03/2014 - 7:30 pm
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With a twenty-something protagonist named Sheila, and a narrative based on conversations and emails between her and her friends, ...
David Grossman and Ian McEwan Falling Out of Time
27/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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Israel’s celebrated author David Grossman author returned to Jewish Book Week to discuss ...
Dannie Abse Speak, Old Parrot
27/02/2014 - 7:30 pm
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Poet Dannie Abse returned to Jewish Book Week with a new...
Ruby Wax Sane New World
27/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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The comedian and “poster girl for mental illness” launches the paperback of ...
Reading Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg 100 years on
27/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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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 perf...
Irving Finkel The Ark before Noah
03/03/2014 - 12:00 pm
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A man walked into the British Museum one day in 2008 and handed Irving Finkel a palm-sized piece of clay carrying instructions for building the ark. Dating f...
Eve Harris and Sathnam Sanghera Hendon and Wolverhampton
27/02/2014 - 1:00 pm
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When it comes to an obsession with marrying off the children, Jews have more in common with others than they sometimes care to admit. Here are two affectiona...
Julie Burchill Unchosen
26/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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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 a...
The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2014
26/02/2014 -
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Enjoy a glass of wine and listen to a lively discussion about the difficulties – and joys – of judging a completely disparate group of fiction and non-fi...
Otto Dov Kulka in conversation with Simon Schama
26/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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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 ...
Film: Making a Killing
26/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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A timely showing of an influential documentary film that helped draw world attention to the thousands of paintings seized by the Nazis which have still not b...
Art and fashion: the legacy of Erwin Blumenfeld
26/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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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 bey...
Noreena Hertz Eyes Wide Open
26/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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Economist Noreena Hertz explores with Daniel Finkelstein how we make decisions. Are emails destroying your ability to think? How do you know which informatio...
Jonathan Miller: Drama and Perception
25/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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Jonathan Miller is one of the most multitalented Britons of his generation: an internationally celebrated opera and theatre director, a physician, writer and...
Thomas Harding Hanns and Rudolf
26/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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It was only at his great-uncle’s funeral that Thomas Harding learned of his German relative’s extraordinary past. Hanns Alexander, an officer in the Brit...
William Sutcliffe The Wall
26/02/2014 - 5:30 pm
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Inspired by a visit to Palestine The Wall is a story of a unnamed divided city, where a boy strays on to the wrong side of the wall to find his life changed ...
Film: The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women
25/02/2014 -
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Remy Blumenfeld, Erwin Blumenfeld’s grandson, wrote and produced this fascinating documentary about the German who survived two world wars to become one of...
Lipika Pelham The Unlikely Settler
25/02/2014 - 1:00 pm
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Lipika Pelham’s childhood in Bengal was haunted by political and physical divisions. Later in life, she experienced similar divisions in Jerusalem, where s...
The challenges of ageing
25/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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The quest for an elixir of youth is never-ending. Yet there are surprising predictors linked to longer and more enjoyable lives: how much one earns, how heal...
Robert Harris An Officer and a Spy
25/02/2014 - 8:30 pm
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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 hi...
Ari Shavit My Promised Land
25/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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A groundbreaking and authoritative examination of Israel by one of the most influential columnists writing about the Middle East today. Facing unprecedented ...
Mark Gevisser Dispatcher
24/02/2014 - 7:00 pm
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As a boy growing up in apartheid Johannesburg Mark Gevisser would play “Dispatcher”, a game that involved sending imaginary couriers on routes mapped out...
Alison Macleod Unexploded
25/02/2014 - 5:30 pm
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Brighton, summer 1940. Fear of invasion brings unspoken desires to the surface as a middle-class English family anxiously awaits news. Geoffrey falls in love...
Imagine… Hitler, the Tiger and Me
25/02/2014 - 3:00 pm
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An opportunity to see the 2013 BBC Imagine documentary about author Judith Kerr in her 90th Birthday year. The creator of some of Britain’s best-loved chil...
50 years of Fiddler on the Roof
25/02/2014 - 8:00 pm
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We celebrate a half-century since the opening of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, looking at the life of the musical on stage and screen and Sholem Aleichem...
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef A Genius of Jewish Law
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When scholar and former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Rabbi Ovadia Yosef died aged 93 in October 2013, vast crowds attended his funeral. Yosef had an unriva...
Andrew Sachs I Know Nothing
25/02/2014 - 8:00 pm
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Andrew Sachs came to the UK with his parents aged eight and will forever be associated with Manuel the Spanish waiter, a role he created in the cult televisi...
Olga Gershenson on Soviet Holocaust Film
23/02/2014 - 6:30 pm
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he Soviet Union made an entire canon of films between the 1930s and the late 1980s about the Holocaust and Nazi anti-semitism. Mostly forgotten or banned, an...
William Klein in conversation with Alan Yentob
25/02/2014 - 5:00 pm
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The influential photographer, painter and filmmaker comes to Jewish Book Week to discuss his career and life with Alan Yentob. Klein (American, born 1928), t...
Rita Goldberg Growing up with the Holocaust
25/02/2014 - 5:00 pm
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Hilde Jacobsthal was brought up in Amsterdam, spent World War Two on the run and met her future husband in liberated Bergen-Belsen where she worked as a nurs...
Eshkol Nevo Neuland
25/02/2014 -
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The wandering Jew has become the wandering Israeli, backpacking in far-flung places in search of meaning and identity. Neuland, an epic new work by feted Isr...
The Leonard Bernstein Letters
25/02/2014 - 3:30 pm
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The American superstar composer and conductor was also an enthusiastic letter writer. Editor Nigel Simeone presents his collection of The Leonard Bernstein L...
In Conversation with the Bible
25/02/2014 - 3:30 pm
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To mark the publication of his latest book of reflections on the Bible, A Rabbi Reads the Torah, and Welcome to the Cavalcade, a Festschrift in honour of his...
Bo Lidegaard and Bernard Wasserstein Rescuers
25/02/2014 - 3:30 pm
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Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the first full history of how the Danish people managed to rescue the lives of 95% of the country’s Jewish population. Like ...
Nazi-Looted Art: A Time Of Reckoning?
25/02/2014 - 2:00 pm
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The discovery of a huge cache of Nazi-plundered paintings in a Munich flat brings hope that thousands of other looted artworks may be found. The revelation h...
Mark Thompson The Life of Danilo Kiš
23/02/2014 - 2:00 pm
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The experimental story-telling of writer Danilo Kiš and his profound meditation on the human condition generated controversy in his native Yugoslavia and ea...
Alain de Botton on News
23/02/2014 - 12:30 pm
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The News: A User’s Manual looks at the peculiar place that “the news” occupies in our lives. de Botton notes that we invest it with an authority which ...
Zeruya Shalev The Remains of Love
23/02/2014 - 12:30 pm
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The writing of best-selling Israeli author Zeruya Shalev has earned her multiple prizes and many adoring fans around the world. Shalev comes to Jewish Book W...
Shlomo Avineri on Theodor Herzl
25/02/2014 - 11:00 am
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The first biography of the father of modern political Zionism in 35 years tells the story of the Austrian journalist who made the idea of a Jewish state his ...
Smoked Salmon Kings
25/02/2014 - 11:00 am
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Purveyors of deli specialities in the old Jewish heartlands of New York and London, Mark Russ Federman and Lance Forman shared their families’ experiences ...
Drawing Life Preview – performance & discussion
22/02/2014 - 8:00 pm
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Drawing Life, a Jewish Music Institute (JMI) production composed by Jocelyn Pook, is inspired by a collection of poems and drawings made by children imprison...