Jewish Book Week is marking its 75th anniversary with the largest and most widely attended festival in recent years.
The annual event, which is London’s longest-running literary festival and began on Sunday, features more than 160 speakers this year and extends beyond its long-time home at Kings Place in King’s Cross to venues elsewhere in London including the British Museum, the British Library and the Bridge Theatre.
The line-up brings together figures from literature, politics, journalism and the performing arts. Among those taking part this year are Booker Prize winners David Grossman and Howard Jacobson, historian Simon Schama, biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore and novelist Esther Freud. Other participants include the actor Janet Suzman, singer Cassidy Janson and former cabinet minister Michael Gove.
Hosted by the Jewish Literary Foundation, the festival typically draws some 15,000 people each year in person and online.
This year’s programme of events opened with a performance by pianist Margaret Fingerhut and violinist Bradley Creswick, featuring works by George Gershwin, Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn and Ernest Bloch, followed by a panel discussion with Jacobson, Schama, Claudia Roden and Hugo Rifkind, setting the tone for a programme that spans politics, culture and contemporary affairs.
Themes this year range from debates on the future of the BBC and assisted dying to discussions on Israel, media polarisation and identity. Other sessions will explore the work of major cultural figures including Philip Roth, Bob Dylan and Stefan Zweig, while also spotlighting emerging writers supported by the Jewish Literary Foundation’s development schemes.
The festival, which runs until Sunday, will also highlight the Genesis Emerging Writers programme, the newly established Jewish Playwrights Programme and the Freudenheim Translation Prize.
Claudia Rubenstein, director of the Jewish Literary Foundation, said the organisation’s purpose is rooted in placing culture and learning at the heart of Jewish life.
“Jewish thriving should depend on Jewish learning, Jewish culture and Jewish values being not marginal to our lives – but central to them. That is why the Jewish Literary Foundation exists, and why we’ve held this festival every year since 1952.
“If I had to describe our mission in one line, I’d say this: we are a yeshivah for the secular Jewish mind. A place where Jewish history, literature, music, argument and imagination are explored without dilution and without dumbing down. We’re here so that people do not simply feel Jewish in a vague or inherited way. We’re here for people to think Jewish, to ask Jewish, and to know Jewish.”
Rubenstein stressed that the event is “not only for Jews”, noting that around a fifth of the speakers and audience members “are not Jewish, but are drawn to Jewish ideas”.
She added: "That’s not a contradiction. Jewish civilisation has always been in conversation with the wider world.”
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