BBUK Virtual Meetings 2025
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
Sacha Stawski “The Current Situation Facing Jews Worldwide and the Response of our European Organisations” (Bureau – 18/02/2025)
Sacha Stawski is president and editor-in-chief of Honestly Concerned an initiative founded in May 2002 to fight biased media coverage of the Middle East conflict and anti-Semitism. As president of “I like Israel” (ILI), he organises an annual Israel day worldwide. He is a member of the B’nai Brith Lodge in Frankfurt, the German representative for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and a member of international networks combating anti-Semitism and the delegitimisation of Israel
Peter Bradley “The Last Train: a Family History of the Final Solution” (BBUK – 22/01/2025)
Peter Bradley, was the Labour MP for The Wrekin between 1997 and 2005. More recently, he co-founded and directed Speakers’ Corner Trust, a charity which promotes freedom of expression, open debate and active citizenship in the UK and developing democracies. He has written, usually on politics, for a wide range of publications, including The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman and the New European.
