Getty Images “Quietly, unexpectedly — and without anybody bothering to consult me — Jewish food has become really, really good,” The Guardian’s food critic Jay Rayner said at London’s Jewish Book Week earlier this month. “Frankly, I’m appalled.” Rayner was referring to London’s new love affair with Middle Eastern food. Salt beef and bagels and…
Photo courtesy Jewish Book Week London As fiction editor of The New Yorker, Deborah Treisman’s job is one of the most enviable in the literary world. It is certainly one of the most influential. In fact, The New York Times described it as a job that carries the literary clout equivalent of St. Peter at…
The emphasis placed on Auschwitz-Birkenau as a place of remembrance has skewed the way we understand the Holocaust, Professor David Cesarani told attendees on the final day of London’s Jewish Book Week on March 1. Speaking with reference to his forthcoming book, “Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49” — which is due to…
(JTA) — When Carolyn Starman Hessel joined the New York-based Jewish Book Council in 1994 – at the request of friend Marsha Posner – she knew nothing about the publishing world. Since then, she’s been called the “Jewish Oprah” for her ability to help authors find audiences, and has enjoyed enormous clout and influence among…
Every year, of the 75,000 young Israelis who complete their military service, it is estimated that around one third leave everything behind to go backpacking. The nomadic ramble through Southeast Asia and South America in that indeterminate period between youth and adulthood is hardly unique to Israel, but it takes on its own characteristics at…
Literature is in Zeruya Shalev’s genes. Born in Kvutzat Kinneret in 1959 — a kibbutz by the shores of the Galilee where the songwriter Naomi Shemer was also born — Shalev grew up with a father who was a literary critic and an uncle who was a poet. Her cousin is the acclaimed novelist Meir…
Copyright William Klein/Courtesy HackelBury Fine Art, London At almost 86, the pioneering photographer, artist and filmmaker William Klein, continues to draw a crowd. On February 23, Klein was at Jewish Book Week in London discussing his life and work with Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC and editor and presenter of the television arts…
The idea that the trial of Alfred Dreyfus inspired Theodor Herzl to write “The Jewish State” is “simply not true,” Shlomo Avineri declared in a pointed, fluent, and well-received lecture that opened the first full day of London’s Jewish Book Week on February 23. Discussing his biography of the father of modern Zionism, “Herzl: Theodor…
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