1. Jewish Bloomsbury: Salons and Schmoozing
A few streets away from Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Bloomsbury Salon, a Jewish couple were schmoozing with an even starrier group of artists, musicians and literati. We’ll explore their patronage of T.S.Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, their familial connections to Oscar Wilde and Giacomo Puccini, and the evening in Paris when they introduced Proust to James Joyce.
2. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“I do not like the Jewish voice”, Virginia Stephens wrote in her diary, yet she loved Leonard Woolf, ‘my Jew’, enough to marry him despite the prejudice of her contemporaries. Known for her casual anti- Semitism, she had close Jewish friends and, after visiting Nazi Germany, published an indictment of 1930s fascism. So should we fear, or admire, Virginia Woolf?
3. The Divine Sarah Bernhardt: The Complex Jewish Identity of the World’s Most Famous Actress
Named by her fans ‘The Divine Sarah’, Bernhardt became an international star of stage and screen, as famous for her excess and eccentricities as for her acting. We will explore her career, consider the ways she was viewed by her contemporaries and think about the meaning of her public declaration, in the face of intense anti-Semitism in her Parisienne community, that “I am a daughter of the great Jewish race”.
4. Shakespeare and the Jews
Why did critics describe Shakespeare’s portrait as “having a decidedly Jewish physiognomy” and did he share our Jewish values? We’ll explore possible reasons that Shakespeare wrote about Venetian Jews and think about how we’re meant to read Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. We’ll also ask whether there is any truth to the claim that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was Jewish and contributed to the writing of his plays.
5. TS Eliot and Antisemitism in Literary London
The case for T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism was successfully prosecuted some years ago, but the recent publication of his complete prose and letters have complicated the issue since, like the old joke, some of his best friends were Jewish. We will explore who they were and how they caused Eliot’s views to change over the course of his writing life.
6. The Most Remarkable Isaac Rosenberg
Usually thought of as one of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, Isaac Rosenberg studied painting at the Slade alongside the Bloomsbury Group and found success as a poet thanks to surprising support from notable non-Jewish patrons. Over a hundred years since his death in WWI, we’ll trace his journey from the poverty stricken East End to the West End to the trenches where he wrote his most famous poems and ask what makes his work so remarkable.
7. Emma Lazarus: The Jewess Who Ruined the US
‘Give me your tired, your poor... Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…’ These words emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty are from a poem by Jewish writer Emma Lazarus. We’ll trace its journey from being considered subversive to acclaimed by the mainstream and attacked by the alt-right, exploring how Jewish culture can contribute to political commentary.
8. Claude Cahun: The Jewish Orlando?
Queer French artist Claude Cahun experimented with the meaning of gender through androgynous self-portraiture, becoming a darling of the modernist and surrealist movements in 1920s and 30s Paris. We will trace the lifelong evolution of the performance artist and theorist, who was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Nantes in 1894, and eventually became an active anti-Nazi resistance worker in Jersey during the 1940s alongside her partner, Marcel Moore.
9. The ‘Jew-consciousness’ of EM Forster
From 1936 onwards novelist E.M. Forster publicly took an anti-Nazi stance and decried antisemitism. We will explore how Forster, usually known for his commentary on class differences and social mores, became, in his own words, ‘Jew-conscious’, challenging the received views of his contemporaries not only with his as his sexual identity but also with his philo-semitism.
10. Louis Golding: Bloomsbury’s Mancunian Jew
Before Coronation Street, there was Magnolia Street and its soap-opera style stories of immigrant Cheetham Hill. We will meet novelist and screenwriter Louis Golding, creator of this Jewish forerunner to Coronation Street, exploring his surprising friendship with black American writer Paul Robeson, his provocative writing about the Manchester community as well as his unconventional life in literary London where he befriended, and was published by, the Bloomsbury Group.