Melbourne Jewish Book Week will return next month with a program built around humour, memory and connection, bringing Israeli, British and Australian writers together at a time when Jewish public life is being tested.
The biennial festival will run from Saturday August 1 to Tuesday August 4, opening with the gala event before its main festival day on Sunday.
Festival Director Debbie Lee tells JWire the event had taken on added meaning since October 7.
“This just gives us something positive to focus on,” Lee said.
“It’s been an outlet for collective solace in a way. We’re working together and pulling this amazing festival together.”
Lee said this year’s festival builds on the 2024 event, which marked a step up in ambition for Melbourne Jewish Book Week.
“We’re continuing that this year,” she said.
“We’re growing, our ambitions are becoming more aspirational, and we’re pulling it off. It’s a really exciting program.”
The opening gala, curated by playwright, producer and theatre-maker Jessica Bellamy, will feature eight writers presenting original short pieces on the theme If You Don’t Laugh…
Lee said the gala has become one of MJBW’s most popular events.
“They write an original piece. Some of them might recite poetry, some of them might sing, but basically it’s up to them how they present,” she said.
“It’s a real celebration to set the scene for the main part of the festival.”
The gala line-up includes international guests Rachel Cockerell, Yishay Ishi Ron and Ayelet Tsabari, alongside Ali Berg, Danny Ben-Moshe, Katia Ariel, Alan Fyfe and Billy Albert, with live music from Galit Klas and Adrian Banner.
Cockerell, a London-based historian and author, will be one of the festival’s major international drawcards.
Her first non-fiction book, Melting Point, traces the story of her great-grandfather David Jochelmann and the Galveston Movement, a little-known effort that brought thousands of Russian Jews to Texas in the years before World War I.
The book follows Jochelmann’s family through two world wars while asking broader questions about belonging, safety, migration and what can be salvaged from the past.
Lee said Cockerell had uncovered a remarkable story through diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and other primary source material.
“She found all this primary source material about the Zionist movement over its course of history, and she has collated this montage of diaries, letters, newspaper clippings,” Lee said.
Cockerell is a 2026 MacDowell Fellow and has spoken about her work on the BBC, CNN, NBC and at TEDx, as well as at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and NYU.
She will appear in International Spotlight: Rachel Cockerell in Conversation and will also take part in In Search of Safe Haven: The Wandering Jew, a session exploring the recurring Jewish search for refuge and the places imagined as possible safe havens.
Israeli-Canadian author Ayelet Tsabari, a writer of Yemeni heritage, will appear in conversation with Lee Kofman. Her debut novel Songs for the Broken-Hearted won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction.
Lee described Tsabari as “award-winning, well-established, highly regarded” and “much loved”.
Israeli author , a former elite combat soldier, will appear in conversation with Ben Lindner. His novel Dog draws on his own experience of PTSD, addiction and recovery after military service.
“He’s drawing on his own life experience, but it’s fictionalised,” Lee said.
“His way of dealing with that is to put it into the creative side of things, and he’s become this very successful writer.”
Lee said Ron’s work had already drawn major attention, with Dog longlisted for Israel’s Sapir Prize and film rights sold.
“He’s on the up and up,” she said.
Ron will also discuss The Girl Who Rode the White Lion, a Holocaust mystery about a Jewish girl protected by a circus and a white lion that later becomes the key to uncovering the past.
The Sunday program will also feature journalist and author Jonathan Freedland appearing live by video link from the UK in conversation with Tali Lavi.
Freedland will discuss The Escape Artist, his account of Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, and The Traitors Circle, about a resistance network in Nazi Germany.
The program also includes Jewish Quarterly Global Conversation: Hamas and its Two Million Hostages, featuring Palestinian American humanitarian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in conversation with Kylie Moore-Gilbert.
Other sessions include Remnants: When The Past Comes Home, with Sophie Stern, Joseph Toltz and Michael Visontay, moderated by Benjamin Preiss, and DMG: Reborn, a new work by Galit Klas, read by Amy Hack, followed by an interactive discussion.
The Art of Satire: New Jewish Fiction will bring together Billy Albert, Alan Fyfe and Steve Toltz, moderated by Scott Whitmont, while The Human Touch: Creativity in the Age of AI will feature Alan Finkel, Nathan Hollier and John M Green.
The program includes sessions on Howard Jacobson’s Howl, Nazis in Australia, grief, upstanders, Jewish migration, romance, PTSD, poetry and Holocaust music.
The Big Book Balagan will bring a lighter mood to the Sunday program, with Bram Presser joined by Elise Hearst, Sarah Krasnostein, Dani Valent and Alice Zaslavsky to discuss books they love.
Lee said the session would add humour to a program that also asks serious questions.
“There’s a lot of reflection,” she said.
Another session, Intersections: Shared Histories, Different Journeys, will examine cultural identity and writing through Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Sri Lankan perspectives.
On Monday August 3, the festival will move to a special venue for Pop-up Poetry, featuring established and emerging poets.
The festival will close on Tuesday August 4 with Out of the Depths, a Musical Soirée, based on a rare Holocaust songbook first published in Bucharest in 1945.
The event has been conceived by Dr Joseph Toltz, co-author of Out of the Depths: The First Collection of Holocaust Songs, with Galit Klas, Adam Starr and other Melbourne musicians.
Lee said the closing event would be “very moving”.
“It has so many compelling elements to it,” she said.
For Lee, who took on the role before October 7, Melbourne Jewish Book Week has become far more than a literary festival.
She said the role helped her find a place in Melbourne’s Jewish community at a time of shock and isolation.
“It gave me a sense of belonging,” she said.
Melbourne Jewish Book Week also runs year-round, with its website housing recordings, interviews and podcasts.
Lee said the biennial festival remained the centrepiece.
“What do I love the most? Look, honestly, it’s really hard to choose,” she said.
“I think it’s just the buzz of the whole event.”