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From mass emigration out of Eastern Europe to the creation of Israel, the last century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writers: their novels, plays, poems and memoirs provided intimate access to new worlds of experience. In The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, Adam Kirsch discusses the impact of writers from Kafka and Roth to Hannah Senesh and Tony Kushner with Booker winner Howard Jacobson, moderated by acclaimed writer Dara Horn, for a discussion of a century of writers and writing that changed the world.

Click here to purchase copies of The Blessing and the Curse : The Jewish People & Their Books in the Twentieth Century by Adam Kirsch, Live A Little by Howard Jacobson and Eternal Life by Dara Horn from our independent book selling partners Blackwell’s.

Howard Jacobson is a multi-award-winning writer of 13 novels and five works of non-fiction, as well as a regular contributor to major newspapers and journals, including a regular column for The Independent. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question.

Adam Kirsch is the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? and The People and the Books: Eighteen Classics of Jewish Literature. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review section and has written for publications including The New Yorker and Tablet. He lives in New York.

Abraham Socher is the founding editor of the Jewish Review of Books and a professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oberlin College. His co-edited edition of Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award last year.”

Sponsored by David and Judy Dangoor

In association with the Jewish Review of Books

In memory of Dr David Cohen CBE