The totally true storytelling club returned for JBW 2011. We selected some of our favourite writers who revealed true moments of beauty, awkwardness, tragedy and hilarity all packaged in 10-minute stories and told with no notes. JBW 2011 theme was ‘Close Call’.

Here are two beautifully written and meticulously researched new novels. Alison Pick’s Booker-longlisted novel, Far to Go, is set in the months leading up to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia where the Bauer family are wrestling with the prospect of sending six year old Pepik on the kindertransport to England. The young traveller in Jake Wallis Simons’ The English German Girl, Rosa, is fifteen. Upon leaving Berlin she is faced with the tremendous burden of securing papers to help the ...

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 Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo, tells twin stories of those who found refuge in the newly established Israeli state and their offspring 60 years on who are starting afresh – yet again – elsewhere.

December 2022 saw the first-ever White House Roundtable on Antisemitism, with second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, describing ‘an epidemic of hate facing our country’. With Jewish students experiencing hostility and threats on campuses, spikes in antisemitic invective on social media platforms, antisemitic outbursts from some elected officials, public figures and entertainers and attacks on synagogues, does American Jewry have a future? Historian S...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has changed the world. From precipitating a refugee crisis throughout Europe as eight million Ukrainians fled their homes, to increased nuclear fears, the threat of famine in Africa and social and economic unrest in Britain, the impact has been seismic and global. What lies ahead? Editor of The Jewish Chronicle Jake Wallis Simons is joined by Ukraine expert, author and The Economist’s former Kyiv corresponden...