Bestselling 2009 Sapir Prize winner, Alon Hilu shed light on the present through his representation of the past. He told the partly true story of the difficult friendship between asickly, but brilliant, Muslim boy and a dynamic Jewish settler, in the shifting world of nineteenth-century Palestine. It is a gothic tale of love, honour and betrayal.

Due to popular demand, Schama returned for a second visit to Jewish Book Week 2013, for a conversation with Ian Black, The Guardian’s Middle East editor, about his book and TV series. This event was not recorded. The Story of the Jews and The Fate of the World is expected to be one of the most discussed books of 2013. Accompanied by a major BBC television series, it is a landmark history of a culture, a people, a world – from the time of Moses to our own. Simon Schama pr...

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 the world’s great troubled cities, it is a riveting and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem: celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn; Palestine’s chief government architect from 1922-1937, Austen St. Barbe Harrison; and the possibly Greek, possibly Arab, architect ...

Ian Black draws on four decades of experience as a Middle East correspondent steeped in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to present a gripping narrative of 100 years of the history of the region, originating in Lord Balfour’s oblique 67-word promise of a homeland for the Jewish people, through to the challenges of today.

Ever since the movement’ s inception, Zionists have advocated very different ideas of Israel: would the dream of Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Weizmann, Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion or Begin triumph? Would Israel be a ‘normal’ state, or a ‘light unto the nations’? The state that emerged, partially out of the ashes of the Shoah, became a refuge for those escaping the horrors of WWII and its aftermath, and to many a utopian ideal. Seventy years on, at the heart of one of the ...