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Our next meeting will be on Tuesday 6 May.

Our book will be: On Freedom by Timothy Snyder.

Contact Rabbi Zahavit for more information. If you’d like to attend this or future meetings please sign up below.

The Big Ideas Book Club is for people who love to read and discuss polemical books. We gather every approximately every 6 weeks to discuss a book which boldly asks that we look at the world differently. We welcome new participants - occasionally, or regularly.

Rabbi Zahavit is a judge on the Wingate Literary Prize so for the coming months we’ll be reading some of the enormous pile of books that she is working through.

The Wingate Literary Prize, British Jewry’s most prestigious book award, was established in 1977 by the late Harold Hyam Wingate. Now in its 48^th year, the annual prize is awarded to the best book – fiction or non-fiction – to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader.

These are the books we have read over the last couple of years, so if these are the kinds of books you read (or would like to read) we’d love you to be part of our respectful, good-natured, robust, but kind conversations! Please find one of us for a chat at shul or contact Rabbi Zahavit if you’d like to come along.

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis by James Davies
White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery by Thomas Harding 
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life by Jesse Baring
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger
The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Empowering Women by Linda Scott
Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics by Carlo Rovelli
Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships by Esther Perel 
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera 
Re-educated: Why it’s never too late to change your life by Lucy Kellaway 
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt , et al.
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
Midlife: a philosophical guide by Kieren Setiya
Poverty Safari: Understanding the anger of Britain's underclass by Darren McGarvey
Humankind: a hopeful history by Rutger Bregman  

Rabbi Zahavit Shalev, Daniel Oppenheimer, Andrew Levy, Ben Winton