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Festival Director, Debbie Lee<\/p>\nMelbourne Jewish Book Week will return next month with a program built around humour, memory and connection, bringing Israeli, British and Australian writers together at a time when Jewish public life is being tested.<\/p>\n
The biennial festival will run from Saturday August 1 to Tuesday August 4, opening with the gala event before its main festival day on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Festival Director Debbie Lee tells JWire the event had taken on added meaning since October 7.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis just gives us something positive to focus on,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been an outlet for collective solace in a way. We\u2019re working together and pulling this amazing festival together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Festival Director, Debbie Lee<\/p>\n
Lee said this year\u2019s festival builds on the 2024 event, which marked a step up in ambition for Melbourne Jewish Book Week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re continuing that this year,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re growing, our ambitions are becoming more aspirational, and we\u2019re pulling it off. It\u2019s a really exciting program.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opening gala, curated by playwright, producer and theatre-maker Jessica Bellamy, will feature eight writers presenting original short pieces on the theme If You Don\u2019t Laugh\u2026<\/p>\n
Lee said the gala has become one of MJBW\u2019s most popular events.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey write an original piece. Some of them might recite poetry, some of them might sing, but basically it\u2019s up to them how they present,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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Rachel Cockerell<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a real celebration to set the scene for the main part of the festival.\u201d<\/p>\n
The gala line-up includes international guests Rachel Cockerell, Yishay Ishi Ron and Ayelet Tsabari, alongside Ali Berg, Danny Ben-Moshe, Katia Ariel, Alan Fyfe and Billy Albert, with live music from Galit Klas and Adrian Banner.<\/p>\n
Cockerell, a London-based historian and author, will be one of the festival\u2019s major international drawcards.<\/p>\n
Her first non-fiction book, Melting Point, traces the story of her great-grandfather David Jochelmann and the Galveston Movement, a little-known effort that brought thousands of Russian Jews to Texas in the years before World War I.<\/p>\n
The book follows Jochelmann\u2019s family through two world wars while asking broader questions about belonging, safety, migration and what can be salvaged from the past.<\/p>\n
Lee said Cockerell had uncovered a remarkable story through diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and other primary source material.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe found all this primary source material about the Zionist movement over its course of history, and she has collated this montage of diaries, letters, newspaper clippings,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n
Cockerell is a 2026 MacDowell Fellow and has spoken about her work on the BBC, CNN, NBC and at TEDx, as well as at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and NYU.<\/p>\n
She will appear in International Spotlight: Rachel Cockerell in Conversation and will also take part in In Search of Safe Haven: The Wandering Jew, a session exploring the recurring Jewish search for refuge and the places imagined as possible safe havens.<\/p>\n
Israeli-Canadian author Ayelet Tsabari, a writer of Yemeni heritage, will appear in conversation with Lee Kofman. Her debut novel Songs for the Broken-Hearted won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction.<\/p>\n
Lee described Tsabari as \u201caward-winning, well-established, highly regarded\u201d and \u201cmuch loved\u201d.<\/p>\n
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Yishay Ishi Ron<\/p>\n
Israeli author , a former elite combat soldier, will appear in conversation with Ben Lindner. His novel Dog draws on his own experience of PTSD, addiction and recovery after military service.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s drawing on his own life experience, but it\u2019s fictionalised,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis way of dealing with that is to put it into the creative side of things, and he\u2019s become this very successful writer.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee said Ron\u2019s work had already drawn major attention, with Dog longlisted for Israel\u2019s Sapir Prize and film rights sold.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s on the up and up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Ron will also discuss The Girl Who Rode the White Lion, a Holocaust mystery about a Jewish girl protected by a circus and a white lion that later becomes the key to uncovering the past.<\/p>\n
The Sunday program will also feature journalist and author Jonathan Freedland appearing live by video link from the UK in conversation with Tali Lavi.<\/p>\n
Freedland will discuss The Escape Artist, his account of Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, and The Traitors Circle, about a resistance network in Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
The program also includes Jewish Quarterly Global Conversation: Hamas and its Two Million Hostages, featuring Palestinian American humanitarian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in conversation with Kylie Moore-Gilbert.<\/p>\n
Other sessions include Remnants: When The Past Comes Home, with Sophie Stern, Joseph Toltz and Michael Visontay, moderated by Benjamin Preiss, and DMG: Reborn, a new work by Galit Klas, read by Amy Hack, followed by an interactive discussion.<\/p>\n
The Art of Satire: New Jewish Fiction will bring together Billy Albert, Alan Fyfe and Steve Toltz, moderated by Scott Whitmont, while The Human Touch: Creativity in the Age of AI will feature Alan Finkel, Nathan Hollier and John M Green.<\/p>\n
The program includes sessions on Howard Jacobson\u2019s Howl, Nazis in Australia, grief, upstanders, Jewish migration, romance, PTSD, poetry and Holocaust music.<\/p>\n
The Big Book Balagan will bring a lighter mood to the Sunday program, with Bram Presser joined by Elise Hearst, Sarah Krasnostein, Dani Valent and Alice Zaslavsky to discuss books they love.<\/p>\n
Lee said the session would add humour to a program that also asks serious questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of reflection,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Another session, Intersections: Shared Histories, Different Journeys, will examine cultural identity and writing through Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Sri Lankan perspectives.<\/p>\n
On Monday August 3, the festival will move to a special venue for Pop-up Poetry, featuring established and emerging poets.<\/p>\n
The festival will close on Tuesday August 4 with Out of the Depths, a Musical Soir\u00e9e, based on a rare Holocaust songbook first published in Bucharest in 1945.<\/p>\n
The event has been conceived by Dr Joseph Toltz, co-author of Out of the Depths: The First Collection of Holocaust Songs, with Galit Klas, Adam Starr and other Melbourne musicians.<\/p>\n
Lee said the closing event would be \u201cvery moving\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has so many compelling elements to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For Lee, who took on the role before October 7, Melbourne Jewish Book Week has become far more than a literary festival.<\/p>\n
She said the role helped her find a place in Melbourne\u2019s Jewish community at a time of shock and isolation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gave me a sense of belonging,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Melbourne Jewish Book Week also runs year-round, with its website housing recordings, interviews and podcasts.<\/p>\n
Lee said the biennial festival remained the centrepiece.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do I love the most? Look, honestly, it\u2019s really hard to choose,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s just the buzz of the whole event.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melbourne Jewish Book Week will return next month with a program built around humour, memory and connection, bringing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24662,23,31447,35039,35040,35041,3304,35042,260,35043,35044,35045,31449],"class_list":["post-47228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-melbourne","tag-alan-finkel","tag-australia","tag-ayelet-tsabari","tag-debbie-lee","tag-holocaust","tag-howard-jacobson","tag-jewish","tag-joseph-toltz","tag-melbourne","tag-melbourne-jewish-book-week","tag-rachel-cockerell","tag-upstander","tag-yishay-ishi-ron"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}