Book Talk

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

Irshad Manji is the winner of Oprah Winfrey’s first annual Chutzpah Award for boldness. As founder of the Moral Courage Project, Irshad equips people to do the right thing in the face of fear. She discovered her mission through a deeply personal journey. In 2003, Irshad released The Trouble with Islam Today, an open letter to her fellow Muslims about why anti-Semitism and other prejudices must end in the name of Allah. In 2007, Irshad turned the book into an Emmy-nominated PBS film, Faith Without Fear. And in 2011, she published Allah, Liberty & Love, which shows how Islam can be reinterpreted for the 21st century. Along the way, Irshad became a professor of moral courage — first teaching at New York University and now lecturing with Oxford University’s Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights. Irshad’s latest book is Don’t Label Me. In our deeply polarized time, she says, standing for what’s right is not enough to make progress. We must also learn to engage the “Other.” Labeling is easy. But listening is a form of moral courage. (more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK

7 PM LISBON • 9 PM UGANDA

xxxxx

Learn about a small Ashkenazi Jewish community that settled in the African country of Uganda after World War II. With no rabbi or Jewish infrastructure, this community of twenty-three families formed a cohesive group that celebrated all Jewish festivals together and upheld their Jewish identity. There is also a small but vibrant indigenous Jewish Ugandan community that survived persecution under the regime of Idi Amin and that survives to this day. Meet representatives of both communities.

(more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 9 PM JERUSALEM

xxxxx

See the award-winning documentary film From Slavery to Freedom and then meet Natan Sharansky in person. He will be in dialogue with historian Dr. Gil Troy, and they will take your questions.
(more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 7 PM LONDON • 8 PM VIENNA

xxxxx

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) is a painting by Gustav Klimt. The portrait was commissioned by the sitter’s husband, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer. The painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. After a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing before the US Supreme Court, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting had indeed been stolen from the family and should be returned. Meet the American journalist Anne-Marie O’Connor who first broke the story to US audiences.  (more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

Morris “Moe” Berg was a Jewish American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball, who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Berg spoke numerous languages and read ten newspapers a day. His reputation as an intellectual was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz show Information Please. Berg was sent by the US government to determine whether the German physicist Werner Heisenberg was developing an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany, and Berg was authorized to shoot Heisenberg if he had definitive proof in the affirmative. Meet Nicholas Dawidoff, author of the best-selling book on which the motion picture was based. He will be in conversation with the well-known journalist and podcaster Jacob Goldstein. (more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 7 PM LONDON

xxxxx

This program pays tribute to the woman who sheltered Anne Frank for three years and then rescued her now-famous diary. Miep Gies oversaw the “secret annex” where the Frank family was housed, while sheltering another Jewish person in her own home.  Meet Gillian Walnes Perry who knew Miep Gies well and accompanied her to the Academy Awards and Meeg Pincus who wrote a delightful book on Miep Gies for young people. (more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

This program is about the exile of Italian Jews to America. Fleeing Mussolini’s racial laws, roughly two thousand Italian Jews landed in America in the 1930s and 40s. They didn’t fit in with either the Italian-American community or the Jewish-American community, yet many Italian Jewish refugees became leaders in their professions and productive contributors to American life.
(more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible, tells the story of the oldest Bible in the world, how its outing as a fraud led to a scandalous death, and why archaeologists now believe it was real — if only they could find it. At once historical drama and modern-day investigation, the book simultaneously explores the 19th-century disappearance of a controversial Bible and the author’s hunt for the manuscript across eight countries and four continents.

(more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

Sophie Scholl was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, co-founder of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-Nazi leaflets throughout Germany with her brother, Hans Scholl. They dropped hundreds of these leaflets from a high gallery at the University of Munich down on crowds of students milling about below — arguably the only full-fledged public protest against Nazism to have occurred. Meet Holocaust historian and anthropologist Dr. Jud Newborn, the world’s leading authority on Hans and Sophie Scholl, who will inspire you and motivate you to speak truth to power. (more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

xxxxx

Like so many children of survivors and refugees, author Victoria Redel grew up in the shadows of her parents’ different escapes from war. For a writer, such ambiguity is rich soil. Redel’s father left Europe with a visa authorized by the Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. From Lisbon he embarked on the Portuguese ship the Quanza and was among the 86 passengers retained on the ship in New York and then in Mexico to be sent back to Lisbon and then presumably to be repatriated into Nazi-occupied Belgium. The ship, after refueling with coal in Virginia, was saved by the remarkable efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in outsmarting Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The Border of Truth is a fictionalized account of this dramatic story. (more…)