The Jewish Book Week 2025 fringe programme offers three separate opportunities to enjoy guided tours and talks around some of London’s most important collections of Jewish arts and literature.

Discover The London Library – 11:00am [SOLD OUT]

The inspiring tour of a historic literary haven. Join a special Jewish Book Week tour of this historic literary haven in St James’s, exploring its Jewish history and vast collection of one million volumes across 17 miles of shelving.

In Association with The London Library.

This event will last approximately 2 hours.

Book tickets here [SOLD OUT]

About the speaker:

Claire Berliner is Head of Programmes at The London Library, which includes overseeing The London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She is also a writer and editor.

London Jewish Art Tour – 11:00am

Join us on this art tour led by art historian Sabine Casparie and explore how two artists use landscape and autobiography to very different effect. We will get an exclusive peek into the studio of celebrated Israeli artist Ori Gersht who works in photography and film. A short walk will take us to Studio Voltaire, a great public gallery hosting emerging artists, where we will see the landscape paintings of Jake Grewal.

Studio visit: Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967, but has lived in London for over 30 years. Throughout his career his work has been concerned with the relationships between history, memory and landscape. He often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories, by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth.

Studio Voltaire: Studio Voltaire is one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit arts and education organisations. We will see Jake Grewal’s landscape paintings in which Grewal draws from Western canons of painting, deftly harnessing the language of Romanticism and suffusing them with a queer gaze and his South Asian heritage to express autobiographical experiences.

This event will last approximately 2 hours.

Book tickets here.

About the speaker:

Sabine Casparie worked as a lawyer before making a career change into art, completing a Postgraduate Diploma in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011 and a Masters in Modern and Contemporary Art at Christie’s Education, London in 2012. Since then she has led contemporary art tours and artist studio tours in and around London. Sabine also teaches at Morley College, she is a contributing writer to Studio International and a collection consultant for CW+, the charity that manages the art collection of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

Jewish Treasures of the British Library – 1:00pm

An exclusive close-up opportunity to see a range of manuscript and printed treasures from the rich collections of the British Library, in a special lunchtime show-and-tell led by Head of Middle East and Central Asian Collections, Michael Erdman. Items in Hebrew as well as Judeo-Hindi, Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Arabic; the latest conservation of Jewish works and others that highlight British Jewish heritage.

This event will last approximately 90 minutes.

Book tickets here.

About the speaker:

Dr Michael Erdman is the Head of Middle East and Central Asia Collections at the British Library.