5784 / 2023-24 PROGRAMME

In-person meetings start at 7:30pm, unless otherwise indicated.

Joining details for ZOOM meetings will be sent shortly before each meeting via the Lit.’s email list.
To be added to the mailing list, please email: ejlsoc@gmail.com

The subscription this year is just £15 – what a bargain!

Please sign up now to avoid a queue at the first meeting, Payment for a single meeting is £5.

You can pay your subscription in two ways. The first is preferred. In both cases please email the treasurer (Gillian Raab) at gillian.raab@gmail.com to let her know you have paid this year’s subscription and giving your email(s), name(s), and (optionally)  telephone contacts.

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15 October 2023         Opening Talk by Bernard Wasserstein on A Small Town in Ukraine: Krakowiec and the Storm of History. In person.

Decades ago, Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of Krakowiec – ‘a little place you’ve never heard of’. This shtetl, forty miles west of Lviv, was where his family originated. His new book, A Small Town in Ukraine: The place we came from, the place we went back to, traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict. Wasserstein uncovers the story of Krakowiec and of his family’s intimate, tortured relationship with it. In his lecture, he will introduce the book that, half-seriously, he calls ‘an autobiography of the period before I was born.’

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London but spent much of his childhood in Scotland. After studying at Oxford, he taught at universities in Britain, the USA, Israel, and Germany. A former professor of history at the Universities of Glasgow and Chicago, he is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (which won the Crime Writers Association’s Golden Dagger prize for non-fiction) and On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War (awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize). He now lives in Amsterdam with his wife, son and three cats.

29 October 2023         Adam Cohen, Hebrew manuscripts in Edinburgh. In person in the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library.
This event is co-sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, constituting the Leverhulme Lecture.

The National Library of Scotland and the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh are outstanding repositories of cultural heritage. Although they constitute a miniscule percentage of their holdings, handwritten Hebrew manuscripts in both institutions offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of Jewish literary and artistic culture as well as something of the history of Jews in Scotland. In this talk, I introduce the entire range of these materials, which span over seven hundred years from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Of particular interest will be the light that these works shed on the interaction of Jews and Christians; we will meet medieval scribes, Renaissance censors, early modern bookbinders, Karaites, Scottish Hebraists, artists, rabbis, and journalists. Because of my own background as a historian of medieval art, I will pay particular attention to the visual aspects of selected materials, which reveal some unexpected surprises.

Dr Adam S. Cohen is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto and currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is a specialist in the history of European illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on Christian and Hebrew subjects. Adam has published articles on the Sephardic Sarajevo Haggadah and the Kennicott Bible; with Sharon Liberman Mintz he is working on the forthcoming, “Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts: From Ashkenaz to America.” For the general public, Adam has written Signs and Wonders: 100 Haggadah Masterpieces (Jerusalem: Toby Press, 2018), a history of the illustrated haggadah from the Middle Ages to the present. With Jill Caskey and Linda Safran, Adam is the author of Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World, just published by Cornell University Press.

12 November 2023    David Gilinsky, ‘Judeo-Persian literature in the period 1317-1340 CE’. In person.

The Mongol Ilkhan Abu Sa’id ruled his Persian empire from the capital Sultaniyya, near Tabriz, from 1317 to 1335 CE. After his death in battle, his appointed successor Arpa Khan became Ilkhan before also being killed in 1336 CE. There followed a dynastic struggle for power, and the empire disintegrated. This latter part of the Ilkhanate was, on balance, a reasonably hospitable environment for religious minorities, like Jews, some of whom reached high power at court, or were prominent doctors. Jewish literature flourished during this period. I will focus on three literary genres:

• Tafsir – translations of the Torah into vernacular Judeo-Persian. We have an excellent example of this in the British Library, copied in 1319 CE.
• Masnavi – original epic poetry – written (50 years before Chaucer) by a poet whose pen name was Shahin, and who is associated with the city of Shiraz. We will survey his literary output (fl. 1327-1359 CE).
• Talmudic Dictionaries – we have an excellent example of a dictionary written for Talmudic scholars, explaining difficult Hebrew and Aramaic words in Judeo-Persian. This was written in Urganj, in 1338 CE.

Most of these works remain unpublished in accessible formats.

David Gilinksy is a PhD candidate at Hamburg University. His doctoral research explores Shahin’s Rabbinic sources. David studied Arabic and Persian as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and completed his MSc by Research at Edinburgh in Islamic Studies in 2022.

17 December 2023     John Lahr in conversation with Elaine Samuel on his recent biography Arthur Miller: American Witness. Zoom.

John Lahr will speak to the Lit on his most recent publication, Arthur Miller: American Witness (https://johnlahr.com/news/). John knew Arthur Miller as well as many of his collaborators, so he looks at Miller very much from the perspective of a theatrical insider. In his talk to the Lit, John will address some of the areas that he had found most fruitful to explore: the extraordinary nature of the Miller family and their family dynamics, the trauma of the Depression and the Miller family’s sociological context, Miller as a student and the autobiographical nature of his plays, the revelatory letter Miller wrote to his parents about his first marriage and his engagement to Marilyn Monroe, as well as his fall from critical grace in the U.S. and his popularity in Europe. This event will be by ZOOM and we are hoping to stock autographed copies of his Arthur Miller in a bookshop near you.

John Lahr has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1991, where, for twenty-one years, he was its Senior Drama Critic. He is the author of eighteen books including Notes on a Cowardly Lion: the Biography of Bert Lahr, (his father), and Prick Up Your Ears: the Biography of Joe Orton, which was made into a film starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave. His Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2014) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Award for Quality of Prose, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the first critic to win a Tony Award, which recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

14 January 2024         Ulrich Loening and Natan Levy on Jews and Judaism and the environment. In person at Marchmont St Giles.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is often blamed for its anthropocentric view that humans were created to rule over and exploit the rest of God’s creations. Yet, our future depends on us harmonising our activities with the workings of nature. We will discuss how this can be achieved and what shelter – if any – Jewish text and tradition can offer against this coming storm. There are no technical reasons that might prevent us changing. Our customary habits need to change and can. It is a matter of personal and political willpower, and of equity and justice over the world. An optimistic image is staring us in the face. Can we realise it?

Natan Levy (PhD) is the Head of Operations for Faiths Forum for London. He received his rabbinical ordination in 2006 from Rabbi Brovender and Rabbi Riskin in Yeshivat Ha’Mivtar, Israel. Natan was environmental liaison to the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, the interfaith consultant to the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 2013 to 2017, and a University Chaplain at Bristol University. Natan is the co-author of Sharing Eden: Green Teachings from Jews, Christians and Muslims. He received his doctorate in environmental theology from Bristol University in 2021.

Ulrich Loening (BA and DPhil in Biochemistry) researched nucleic acids for more than 20 years. Later he engaged with philosophy of science, becoming Director of the Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh for nearly 20 years. Now retired, he continues his interest from home, lecturing and writing on how people relate to Nature, and how and why we have messed up. ‘What can we do now?’, Ulrich’s paper on this subject, is soon to be published as a chapter in a Springer-Nature book.

28 January 2024         Cross-community Burns Supper.

11 February 2024       Daniel Lines, Antisemitism and the Left: The French Case in the Thirties and Forties. In person.

The history of antisemitism and the Left in France has its roots in the 19^th Century and the issue continues to be alive today, as some sections of the French Left refuse to face it when it involves acts or speeches by members of the Muslim or Black African Communities. I shall concentrate on the Thirties and Forties when the extraordinary circumstances of the defeat and the ensuing German Occupation pushed some leaders of the Left to the head of two of the main pro-Nazi parties. I shall describe the cause of their trajectory from left to extreme right and their fate.

Daniel Lines was born in Geneva in 1952. His father was a Londoner; his mother was born in Geneva, a daughter of Jewish refugees from the Tsarist Empire. He was educated in Geneva, obtaining a PhD in mathematics in 1981. He then occupied various academic positions, the last active one being that of Senior Lecturer in mathematics at the University of Dijon (France). He retired early in 2004 and came to live with his partner in Glasgow. He also studies Yiddish, his grandparents’ mother tongue, with Heather Valencia’s group.

10 March 2024           Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on her latest book, Wolf Hunt. Zoom.
This event is part of Jewish Book Week.

Lilach seems to have it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a happy marriage and a close relationship with her teenage son, Adam. But when a local synagogue is brutally attacked, her shy, reclusive son is compelled to join a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. And when a Black teenager dies, rumours begin to circulate that Adam and his new friends might have been involved. As scrutiny invades Lilach’s peaceful home, and her family’s stability is threatened, she is forced to reckon with a devastating question: do you ever really know what your child is capable of?

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982. She is a practising clinical psychologist, has been a news editor on Israel’s leading newspaper and has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement. One Night, Markovitch, her first novel, won the Sapir Prize for best debut. Her novel Waking Lions was a New York Times Book of the Year and won the Wingate Prize, and her novel Liar was Editor’s Choice in People magazine. All of her novels are available from Pushkin Press.

14 April 2024  DATE CHANGE: 24th March    New date: 21st April   David Shulman, Saving Israel from herself: fighting the occupation and the government. Zoom.

David Shulman is a philologist and cultural historian specialising in Southern India who is an Emeritus Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is also a long-term activist in Ta’ayush, an Israeli peace group working in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the author of several books, including Freedom and Despair, published by University of Chicago Press. He has a new book on the Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, published by Intellect Press and co-authored with the photographer Margaret Olin. It’s called The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine and offers a portrait of Palestinian lives under the Occupation.

5 May 2024     Martin Chamberlain, Jewishness and equality law in the UK. In person.

Martin’s talk will use UK case law to examine how the law understands Jewishness and Jewish religious practice. Why are Jews and Sikhs, but not Muslims or Christians, protected by the prohibition on race discrimination? What does this tell us about the common misconception that antisemitism is not (really) racism? How does UK jurisprudence compare to that of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU on the place of religion in the public square? How does the prohibition on sex discrimination affect Jewish, Muslim and other schools

Martin Chamberlain was born and brought up in Edinburgh and practised as a barrister in London, specialising in public law and human rights. He is now a judge of the High Court of England and Wales.