Join us for an evening of music and discussion to celebrate the 75th anniversary of our global festival of ideas, with music from celebrated performers and a discussion featuring some of the UK’s leading intellectual lights.

Celebrate the 75th edition of London’s longest-running – and some would say best! – literary festival with words and music.

In conversation with Hugo Rifkind, guests will include three of Jewish Book Week’s favourite speakers – Howard Jacobson, Claudia Roden, and Sir Simon Schama, all at school when the festival began in 1952.

Opening the evening, internationally renowned pianist Margaret Fingerhut MBE and violinist Bradley Creswick, Leader Emeritus of Royal Northern Sinfonia, will perform works by George Gershwin, Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Henryk Wieniawski and Ernest Bloch.

This event will last approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, including an interval.

Margaret Fingerhut

Margaret Fingerhut MBE has a distinguished career which has taken her all over the world. She has performed with most of the UK’s major orchestras in venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican. She is often heard on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM and many radio stations worldwide. Her acclaimed discography reflects her long-standing fascination with exploring lesser-known repertoire and includes many works by British composers as well as pioneering collections of 19th-century Russian and early 20th-century French piano music. Her most recent recording Ukraine – A Piano Portrait was hailed as “a compelling testament” in American Record Guide. Margaret was recently awarded an MBE in recognition of her services to music and charitable fundraising.

Bradley Creswick

Bradley Creswick has recently been made Leader Emeritus of Royal Northern Sinfonia and began his long relationship with them in 1984. In 1987 he moved to London to lead the Philharmonia and then the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, returning to the Sinfonia in 1994. Many solo recordings include Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending (in which he was also soloist in the 1989 BBC Proms) and Concerto Accademico for EMI, Venus Blazing by Deirdre Gribbin with RTE Symphony Orchestra on RTE Lyric and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra for Novalis. Bradley has twice taken part in the Marlboro Music Festival in America and has occasionally been heard playing Western Swing fiddle ‘back home’.

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson has written seventeen novels and six works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

Simon Schama

Sir Simon Schama’s award-winning books include A History of Britain and The Story of the Jews. He has written and presented over 50 films for the BBC on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy and American politics, and he co-presented the landmark series on the history of world art, Civilisations.

Claudia Roden

Claudia Roden is a food writer with a special interest in the history and cultural background of food. Born in Egypt, she specialises in the cuisines of the Middle East and North Africa, the Mediterranean and Jewish food. Her books are said to have influenced what we eat in Britain today and to have sparked an interest in the academic study of food. She received a CBE in 2022 for services to culinary culture.

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind is an award-winning Edinburgh-born journalist who writes columns for The Times, The Spectator and GQ and presents his own show for Times Radio. He writes the satirical Times column My Week on Saturdays and is a frequent panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz.