Jewish Book Week presented two witty novels of marriage in the suburbs: in London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb, childhood sweethearts Adam and Rachel are set for a life of domestic bliss. In Chicago, Edie, matriarch of the Middlesteins, is eating herself to death and her family can’t stop her. Francesca Segal discussed The Innocents with Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins. Positioned respectively at the start and end of a marriage, both these books look fondly at Jewish habits...

A journey back to British Mandate Palestine, peopled by Arabs, Jews and Britons, a intriguing world whose shadow lingers over Israel today. Journalist and novelist Hadara Lazar interviewed more than 100 people over 25 years for a collection of perspectives that show what has been remembered and ignored, refuted and admitted. “My purpose is not to research what used to be but to uncover what people remember from that time, to find the link between their words and the myth that was...

How was life for Jews in medieval England? Recent scholarship and a groundbreaking new translation of Hebrew poetry from Norwich shed light on a dark period of Anglo-Jewish history. Keiron Pim and Miri Rubin discuss the Jew Meir of Norwich and the writings of a monk, Thomas of Monmouth, the first Christian narrative to link Jews to child murder. Into the Light the Medieva...

Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2018, and described by Philippe Sands as ‘Luminous, elegant, haunting’, The Cut Out Girl tells the true story of the author’s grandparents, and the young girl they fostered to hide her from the Nazis in occupied Holland. This is a deeply moving story of family, loss and the devastation wrought by war.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil his friend’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to publishing and canonising Kafka’s work. That ‘betrayal’ of his friend’s last wish led to an international legal battle — raising the question of whether Kafka’s papers should come to rest in Germany, or be considered the cultural inheritance of Israel. ...

Munich, November 1918: in the final days of WWI, revolutionaries occupied official buildings and overthrew the monarchy. At the head of the newly declared Free State of Bavaria was journalist and theatre critic, Kurt Eisner. He was joined by the luminaries of German cultural history — Thomas Mann, Ernst Toller and Rainer Maria Rilke. Yet the idyll would not last: in February 1919, Eisner was assassinated and the dream shattered. But, while it survived, it was the writers, poets, playwright...