Vancouver Jewish Book Festival 2022

The Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival will warm up your winter nights with fascinating authors from across Canada, USA, Israel, Australia and Great Britain February 6-10, 2022

Vancouver Jewish Book Festival 2022

When: February 6-10, 2022
Where: Online (view digital program here)
Tickets: $99 for an all-access pass for streaming every event. Individual event tickets range from $12 to $24

The big themes emerge organically from the world around us: investigating the rise of the new anti-Semitism, exploring diverse identities and the formative place of the Holocaust there; and in this light, unpacking some parallels between the Jewish and the Indigenous experience.

Featured 2022 Festival authors will include: ​ Opening Event with a duo of brilliant polemicists, American novelist and journalist DARA HORN (with her book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present) and British comedian and writer DAVID BADDIEL (with his book Jews Don‘t Count). 

The annual Book Clubs event will feature bestselling Australian author HEATHER MORRIS with her novel Three Sisters, the last in the Tattooist of Auschwitz trilogy that has taken the world by storm.

For the Closing Night, DANIEL SOKATCH, an expert who understands both sides of one of the world’s most complex and controversial topics the Israeli-Palestianian conflict will present Can We Talk About Israel? A Guide for the Curious, Confused and Conflicted. 

Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction GARY BARWIN brings Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy to the festival and there’s US author JAI CHAKRABARTI whose A Play for the End of the World, takes his protagonist’s quest all the way to India in a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present.

Short stories will be celebrated in an event with Vancouver’s RACHEL ROSE and her collection The Octopus Has Three Hearts, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, together with Montreal’s AMI SANDS BRODOFF presenting her intricately linked stories in The Sleep of Apples.

From Toronto, novelist and cultural critic HAL NIEDZVIECKI will discuss his latest novel The Lost Expert, situated at the intersection between pop culture, media and individuality. 

Fascinating stories of artists caught in the treacherous web of WWII will be presented by two US writers sharing a historical fiction subject: bestselling author MEG WAITE CLAYTON with The Postmistress of Paris and painter/writer MICHAELA CARTER with Leonora in the Morning Light.

History continues to have a very important place: LEAH GARRETT will present X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II, (a real historical inspiration for Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds!) and MENACHEM KAISER, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Non-Fiction will take festival goers through the gripping story of retrieving a lost treasur in Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure. 

BC authors will be represented by ISA MILMAN with her memoir Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History and Home, RACHEL MINES with her translation of Jonah Rosenfeld’s The Rivals and Other Stories; and, in an Epilogue with profound interlaced roots in our community, ROBERT KRELL will launch his memoir Sounds from Silence and ALAN TWIGG, his comprehensive literary history Out Of Hiding: Holocaust Literature Of British Columbia, an event moderated by local Renaissance man YOSEF WOSK. 

Win Access

One lucky Miss604 reader/follower will win access to the Jewish Book Festival event of their choice! Here’s how to enter:

• Leave a comment on this post (1 entry)
• Copy/paste the text below on Twitter for a bonus entry (1 entry)

I will draw one winner at random from all entries at 12:00pm on Monday, January 31, 2022. UPDATE! The winner is Dane.

Related: JCC Greater Vancouver