To pur­chase a copy of Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World or Weina Dai Randel’s Night Angels, please click here! 

Join Jonathan Freed­land and Weina Dai Ran­del in a con­ver­sa­tion about the sto­ries we know and tell about escap­ing the Holo­caust – fact, fic­tion, and the some­times blurred line between them. Mod­er­at­ed by Stephanie But­nick, host of Tablet’s Unortho­dox podcast.

Jonathan Freed­land is a Guardian colum­nist and the paper’s for­mer Wash­ing­ton cor­re­spon­dent. He is the pre­sen­ter of BBC Radio 4’s con­tem­po­rary his­to­ry series, The Long View, as well as two pod­casts, Pol­i­tics Week­ly Amer­i­ca for the Guardian and Unholy, along­side the Israeli jour­nal­ist Yonit Levi. He is a past win­ner of an Orwell Prize for jour­nal­ism and the author of twelve books, the lat­est being The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, hailed by Sir Antony Beevor as ​‘an imme­di­ate clas­sic of Holo­caust lit­er­a­ture.’ He has writ­ten nine thrillers, most­ly as Sam Bourne, includ­ing The Right­eous Men which was a Sun­day Times num­ber-one best­seller. The Escape Artist won two 72nd Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards: the Biog­ra­phy Award in Mem­o­ry of Sara Beren­son Stone and the Holo­caust Award in Mem­o­ry of Ernest W. Michel

Weina Dai Ran­del is the award-win­ning author of The Last Rose of Shang­hai as well as The Moon in the Palace and The Empress of Bright Moon, a his­tor­i­cal duol­o­gy about Wu Zetian, China’s only female emper­or. Weina is the win­ner of the RWA RITA Award, a Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award final­ist, a Goodreads Choice Award semi­fi­nal­ist, and an RT Review­ers’ Choice Award nom­i­nee. Her books have been trans­lat­ed into twelve lan­guages and sold world­wide. Born in Chi­na, Weina came to the Unit­ed States at twen­ty-four. She holds an MA in Eng­lish from Texas Woman’s Uni­ver­si­ty in Den­ton, Texas. Inter­views with Weina have appeared on WFAA’s Good Morn­ing Texas and in such pub­li­ca­tions as Chi­na Dai­ly, World Lit­er­a­ture Today, the Wall Street Jour­nal, Huff­in­g­ton Post, and Los Ange­les Review of Books. After liv­ing in Texas for years, Weina now resides in Boston with her lov­ing hus­band, two chil­dren, and a fam­i­ly of chip­munks in the backyard. 

Stephanie But­nick is deputy edi­tor of Tablet Mag­a­zine and a host of the Unortho­dox pod­cast. She is the author, along with her co-hosts, of The Newish Jew­ish Ency­clo­pe­dia: From Abra­ham to Zabar’s and Every­thing in Between. She has writ­ten for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Co-pre­sent­ed by Jew­ish Book Coun­cil, The Jew­ish Muse­um, and Tablet Mag­a­zine