A few years ago, novelist, film director and screenwriter Rebecca Miller and her children were rowing across the lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, when she spotted a crowd of Chasidic families enjoying a day out in the sunshine.

The extraordinary story of a Holocaust heroine who saved Jews from the Nazis by hiding them in animal cages at Warsaw Zoo, has been published in Britain for the first time.

Diane Ackerman's bestselling book describes how Antonina Zabinski and her husband Jan - a keeper at the zoo - risked their lives to protect more than 300 people.

American Jewish novelist AM Homes has won this year's Women's Prize for Fiction, beating favourite Hilary Mantel.

She was awarded the £30,000 prize for her novel May We Be Forgiven, about the relationship between two brothers. Its main character Harry is Jewish and the novel deals at times with questions of religion.

Hungary is not the best place to be Jewish at the moment, with rising antisemitism and the extreme nationalist Jobbik party a major force in the country’s parliament. Earlier this month, on the eve of the World Jewish Congress’s defiant plenary assembly in Budapest, Jobbik was allowed to stage a quasi-military antisemitic rally.

British author Francesca Segal has won the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature in fiction for her debut novel The Innocents.

The prize, which is awarded by the New York Jewish Book Council , is worth $100,000 (£66,000).

When David Lean directed Oliver Twist 65 years ago, the character of Fagin had already been long established as a popular villain. There was the serialisation and subsequent editions of Charles Dickens's novel, while the celebrated actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree played the part in a successful stage version in 1905. And there had been many film adaptations.

A handwritten poem written by one of Victorian Jewry's most highly-regarded writers and feminist thinkers shortly before her suicide is expected to fetch up to £3,000 when it is auctioned next month.