Shafak and Baddiel join first fully online Jewish Book Week

Jewish Book Week will be fully online for the first time this year, featuring Elif Shafak and David Baddiel among others on the bill.

The festival, now in its 69th year, will be streamed live both from London multi-arts venue Kings Place and the homes of speakers across the UK as well as Canada, France, Germany, Israel and the US.

The festival, which runs from 27th February to 7th March, features more than 50 Q&As, talks and debates. It includes Baddiel who returns to the festival for the first time in a decade with his part-polemic, part-personal Jews Don’t Count (TLS Books), while Elif Shafak discusses her How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division (Wellcome Collection).

Following his BBC1 series “My Family, The Holocaust and Me” Rob Rinder joins Survivors (Yale University Press) author Rebecca Clifford while David Pryce-Jones shares a lifetime of literary encounters with Frederic Raphael.

Authors appearing live from across the globe include France’s third-ever female rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, Nazi hunter Effraim Zuroff, award-winning American photographer Max Hirshfeld and former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon.

Festival director Claudia Rubenstein said: “After 69 years Jewish Book Week continues to both innovate and do what it does best: once again bringing our audience a wide range of the best speakers, thinkers and writers, but this time direct to wherever they are in the world, whenever they want to watch.”

Also featured in the line-up are "Closer" playwright Patrick Marber, Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner, Tom Stoppard biographer Hermione Lee, Times columnist Oliver Kamm, poets Aviva Dautch and Jacqueline Saphra, film writer David Thomson, novelists Howard Jacobson and Lionel Shriver and Pulitzer-winning journalist Jonathan Kaufman.

The festival is currently being preceded by the online-only Gamechangers series on Mondays in January and February, with speakers including Oliver Stone, Helena Kennedy and Shlomo Avineri, and a special family event with former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen on 7th February, his first live appearance since his long battle with Covid last year.

Tickets go on sale on 28th January, when the full programme of 50+ events will be available online.