Double Bill Offer: Book for the Jewish Book Week events in St Pancras Room tonight – ‘Kabbalah Revealed: Through history and fiction’ at 6.30pm and ‘The Jewish World: The Remembered and Forgotten’ at 8pm – to receive a 20% discount. 

Please note, this offer cannot be combined with other Jewish Book Week offers.

Harry Freedman, author of the acclaimed The Talmud: A Biography, and novelist Ariel Kahn discuss and explore the meaning and relevance of the Kabbalah today. In Scandal, Secrecy and the Soul: A History of Kabbalah, Harry tells the fascinating story of Kabbalah from its earliest origins, while Ariel, in his debut novel Raising Sparks, tells the story of Malka, a young girl from Jerusalem’s Hasidic community, who discovers she has an extraordinary gift.

Harry Freedman writes about the history of religion and ideas and their relevance to the world today. His previous books include The Talmud: A Biography and The Murderous History of Bible Translations. Having spent 20 years in rural Devon he now lives in London with his wife Karen. He has two grown-up children, two adult step children and an expanding number of grandchildren.

Ariel Kahn is a prize-winning writer and academic. He initially trained to be a rabbi in Israel. Whilst in Israel, he set up a writing group at the rabbinical school with fellow student, Matt Eisenfeld. Ariel was also the driving force in the Arab Israeli Book Club, which he set up with Palestinian novelist Samir El Youssef. The club was dedicated to building bridges through literature and shared discussion. The book club will be resurrected in 2018. He has won the Bloomsbury New Voices competition and came runner-up in the national Pulp Idol Fiction competition in 2017.

George Prochnik’s latest book, Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem was a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice’ and was shortlisted for the Wingate prize. The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, received the National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir in 2014. Prochnik is also the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the LA Review of Books, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine.

Sponsored by Eduard Shyfrin and family.

Heritage tourism has boomed in the last half century, especially in older industrial cities such as Kiev, Berlin, Bucharest, Krakow, London and New York. Jews, often rediscovering their family’s traumatic pasts marked by the Holocaust, have become a vital component of this burgeoning heritage industry.

Daniel Walkowitz invites readers to join him on his travels. Part family saga and part tour guide, this is a deeply personal analysis of Jewish history as told in public history – museums, heritage sites, memorials – that illustrate what is being remembered, what memorialised, what forgotten, and what ignored.

Daniel Walkowitz is emeritus professor of history and of social and cultural analysis at New York University. An influential labor and urban historian, his many books include City Folk: English Country Dance and Politics of the Folk in America.

Rebecca Taylor is the editor of Jewish Renaissance magazine. She has interviewed everyone from David Cameron to Jesse Jackson in a career that started at the Japan Times in Tokyo. She went on to work at The Guardian and as News Editor for Time Out London before taking up her role at JR in 2014.