BBUK Virtual Meetings 2025

Malcolm Singer: "Leonard Bernstein - the Jewish Works" (Heritage Days, 10December 2025)

Leonard Bernstein is best known as an inspirational conductor, a passionate educator and as the composer of West Side Story. However, he wrote much other music, and 'Jewish’ culture influenced him enormously.

In this talk, Malcolm Singer examines some of Bernstein’s ‘Jewish’ works and explore how, as the American musicologist Jack Gottleib puts it “(Bernstein’s) own and twentieth century

society’s crisis of faith, is explored with love and humanity” in his output.

Jayne Wynick: "Voice From The Heart - A Year of War" (Bureau, 2 December 2025)

The world changed on October 7th 2023 for every Jewish person, both in Israel and around the world. In her book "Voice from the heart - a year of war", Jayne Wynick shares one Jewish women’s perspective of her life from the Diaspora since that fateful day; her fears and her emotions as the world reacted to the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Raw and emotional, ranging from hope, worry, fear, despair, anger, resilience and resignation come on every page, this account provides a unique daily view of a year of war.

Rabbi Jonathan Rosen: "How did we become the People of the Book ?  Tracing the story of a profound evolution" (Heritage Days, 26 November 2025)

Rabbi Miriam Berger: "Jews are The People of The Book: how do we encourage the Traditions of The Book in the 21st Century" (Heritage Days, 12 November 2025)

Rabbi Miriam Berger is Founder Director of Wellspring.

Does being people of the book root us in something stable and unchanging or are we responsible to write a new chapter in every generation?  This session explores how we create an unchanging Judaism to pass from generation to generation whilst also ensuring Judaism is relevant in our lives and something accessible for the next generations. Where do we find our own redlines between the unchanging constant and our evolving Judaism?

Caron Sethill: "The Journey of Books" (Heritage Days, 22 October 2025)

Caron Sethill is Programme Manager Europe at the National Library of Israel.

To the Jewish people, books are and have always been rightful members of the community, and there-fore participants in all the journeys and tribulations the community underwent. In some cases, the communities venerated them as holy artifacts, possessed of near-magical beneficial properties. 

 In this talk, Caron explores some of the paths the outstanding volumes in the National Library of Israel's collections have taken through history.

Rosie Whitehouse: "Two Sisters: Betrayal, Love and Resistance in Wartime France" (Heritage Days, 17 September 2025)

Rosie Whitehouse is a journalist who writes about Holocaust survivors for BBC Online, the Observer, Tablet, the Jewish Chronicle and Haaretz. She is the author of The People on the Beach and the Bradt guide to Europe’s Holocaust memorials, museums and sites.

Efrat Perri: Briefing with the Embassy of Israel in the UK (Bureau - 27/08/2025)

Efrat Perri, Director of Public Diplomacy at the Embassy of Israel in London, gave a briefing on the current situation in Israel, followed by an opportunity to ask questions

Tony Zendle: "Let music be the food of love ...Ashkenazi style" (BBUK - 16/07/2025)

Jewish songs about food from the Pale of Settlement to the East End and East Side and beyond.

Throughout history music has been used to express our culture, and food has formed an integral part of Jewish Song for centuries. It has also been used in a political sense through the Enlightenment.

The talk reflects how music and the values of the era fit into the Jewish story.

Martin Winstone: "What is Holocaust distortion" (Bureau – 17/06/2025)

Martin Winstone is Senior Historical Advisor to the Holocaust Educational Trust, Project Historian for the forth-coming UK Holocaust Memorial, and the author of the books The Holocaust Sites of Europe and The Dark Heart of Hitler’s Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland under the General Government. He is also a member of the UK delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the 2024 chair of IHRA’s Education Working Group.

Debra Brunner: "The New Middle East" (BBUK – 16/05/2025)

Debra Brunner, as CEO of The Together Plan, is leading the effort to use heritage to reconnect the post Soviet Jewish Community of Belarus with their identity, history and culture. She will tell us how this is helping to establish the community to a position of strength and self-sufficiency within the wider Jewish world

Jotam Confino: "The New Middle East" (Bureau – 15/04/2025)

Jotam Confino has been reporting on the Middle East since 2018 for a variety of media, including CBS News, BBC, The Telegraph, Ha’aretz, USA Today, Sky News, Times Radio, TalkTV, GB News, as well as Danish media. He has a BA in Inter-national Studies from Roskilde University and an M.A. in Security & Diplomacy from Tel Aviv University.

Rabbi Major Reuben Livingstone: "UK Defence and Israel - still a partnership?" (BBUK – 26/03/2025)

Rabbi Major Reuben Livingstone, Senior Chaplain to HM Jewish Armed Forces since 2012. Previously he was a barrister and a communal rabbi