Who were the real outsiders? with David Herman
Shabbat 7 December at 3.45pm at Rabbi Wittenberg’s home
Jewish refugee artists, writers and thinkers had a huge impact on post-war Britain. Some fitted in quickly and became insiders: Nobel Prize winning scientists like Ernst Chain and Max Born, filmmakers like Alexander Korda and Emeric Pressburger, writers like Arthur Koestler and thinkers like Isaiah Belrin and Karl Popper. But others remained outsiders, many for the rest of their lives: Expressionist artists, Yiddish poets, Marxists, maverick historians like Norbert Elias, those who couldn’t learn English like the theatre critic Alfred Kerr. Why did some fit in, while others couldn't? Who were the real outsiders?  

Judith Kerr with David Herman
Shabbat 18 January at 3.45pm at Rabbi Wittenberg’s home
The recent death of the famous children's writer, Judith Kerr, an old family friend, received an enormous amount of attention. Many of her best-known books have been loved by generations of young children. Tributes pointed out that she was a German Jewish refugee. What tended to be missing, though, was a careful reading of her famous autobiographical trilogy about coming to England as a refugee and what this tells us about the experience of refugees from Nazism, in particular the darker side of the refugee experience.  

David Herman is the son of two refugees from central Europe and has written widely on the experience and impact of Jewish refugees.