Walking to Auschwitz: A Personal Journey
Five years after walking the Western Front for his acclaimed The Path of Peace, Sir Anthony Seldon undertook an even tougher journey: 1,300km from Kilometre Zero to Auschwitz. In conversation with Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum, the No.1 bestselling historian reflects on the people he encountered along the way and on the wartime stories of those […]
Heroism & Rebirth in Nazi Europe
An unlikely team of parachutists drop into Nazi Europe. A great adventure? An act of madness? An elaborate suicide? In Out of the Sky, Matti Friedman unravels one of the Second World War’s strangest episodes: an operation serving two masters hostile to each other, carried out by young women and men who, having escaped the […]
A Workshop on New Jew-ish Writing
Join us for a discussion and creative writing workshop. We will be responding to Fridays and Saturdays, an anthology of new Jewish writing funded by Limmud featuring contributions from Sophie Herxheimer and Gemma Seltzer alongside a series of lesser-known voices. We’ll discuss the process of compiling the anthology, reflect collectively about what it means to write Jew-ish […]
Dangerous Debuts
Humour and horror find unexpected harmony in these two acclaimed debut novels, whose authors join Write & Shine founder and Ways of Living author Gemma Seltzer in conversation. In The Decadence, Leon Craig follows her short-story collection Parallel Hells with a tale of a forbidden lockdown-escape to a decaying manor house, where old friends – […]
The Einstein Vendetta
Subtitled Hitler, Mussolini and a True Story of Murder, Thomas Harding’s latest takes us to Italy in the summer of 1944. Villa Il Focardo is home to Robert Einstein, cousin of Albert, the world-famous scientist and a prominent enemy of the Nazi regime. Just 12 hours after a unit of German soldiers arrive, they have […]
Faith, Sex & Daring: An Orthodox Insight
What happens if one refuses to choose between abandoning their roots and abandoning themselves? Yehudis Fletcher, daughter of a rabbi raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, felt fenced in by arbitrary rules and unanswered questions. Growing up, repeatedly let down by those meant to protect her and with her sexuality at odds with family expectations, […]
The Genius Myth
“Male, of middle or upper-middle parentage, preferably Jewish” was Hans Eysenck’s notorious sketch of a ‘genius’. The world has largely agreed, from da Vinci and Tolstoy to the Beatles and Elon Musk. In The Genius Myth, a Guardian and FT Book of the Year, Helen Lewis unpicks the allure of the lone male prodigy and […]
What’s Next for Jewish Books: A conversation with The Wingate Prize
Be part of a conversation with author Emily Kasriel and this year’s Wingate Prize judges as they chat with the winner of the 2026 Prize. The panel will discuss the opportunities and challenges facing Jewish writing today including the themes that writers are grappling with, how and where Jewish writing sits in today’s marketplace, how […]
HRT: Everything Your Mother Didn’t Tell You
Navigating the menopause can feel overwhelming amid so much conflicting information. Dr Ellie Cannon’s The Little Book of HRT is an accessible, engaging guide that goes far beyond what a short GP visit can cover. A practising GP, Mail on Sunday health columnist and regular on-screen doctor for BBC Breakfast, ITV and Channel 5, she […]
Across the Divide: Jewish & Arab Israeli Women
Peace activist Vivian Silver was one of many murdered in the Gaza Envelope on 7 October. Amid profound grief, her partners in peace have continued her work with Women Write Hope: Life Stories of Jewish and Arab Women Waging Peace Amidst War. We welcome two key figures behind this remarkable initiative: social changemaker Ghadir Hani, […]
Mahler & Freud: A Viennese Encounter
Raffaello Morales, founder of London’s Fidelio Café and conductor of the Fidelio Orchestra, joins renowned critic and cultural historian Norman Lebrecht, whose works on Mahler explore Jewish creativity and fin-de-siècle Vienna. Together they discuss The Earth to the Skies, Morales’s atmospheric novel rooted in the worlds of Mahler and Freud at a moment when art, […]
Philip Roth: A Life
Few writers were more devoted to their craft than Philip Roth, even while mixing with the Kennedys and navigating a string of famous and infamous romances. For all his writing on sex and self, the Pulitzer winner saw himself as a socially withdrawn “unchaste monk”. Stanford professor Steven J. Zipperstein joins us to discuss Stung […]