Eight new Jewish plays!

Sun Oct 18 15:08:02 BST 2026

18 October, 2026

** NEW JEWISH THEATRE
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Want to see more Jewish stories on stage? Our Jewish Playwrights Programme, now in its second year, is developing the work of eight emerging playwrights, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Their plays span continents and generations, from sweeping family sagas to stories of assimilation, political upheaval and immigrant life. Together, they reflect the breadth of Jewish experience and the many ways it can be told on stage.

Read on to meet the playwrights, and get a sneak peek at last week’s readers’ retreat, a celebration of the joy of reading.

** OUR JEWISH PLAYWRIGHTS COHORT
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With applications received from all over the UK, we’re thrilled to welcome Kayla Feldman, Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller, Kali Klein-Hughes, Dylan Zwickel, Thom Munden, Alexandra Hart, Eliana Ostro and Esther Caplin to our 2026/27 cohort.

The cohort will be mentored by Julia Pascal, one of Britain's most distinguished playwrights and the first woman to direct at The National Theatre. With backgrounds spanning directing, film, poetry, fiction and art history, the cohort will develop plays set across more than a century of Jewish life, from the early 1900s to the near future.

We can’t wait to support these writers, their work and the enrichment of Jewish theatre in the UK.
EXPLORE THE COHORT (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/awards-prizes/jewish-playwrights-programme-2026-2027)

** A READING RETREAT TO REMEMBER
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Last week, we hosted our first-ever readers’ retreat, celebrating the great British Jewish novel with novelist Howard Jacobson and poet Aviva Dautch. We asked Aviva, who led our literary discussions throughout the retreat, to share what made the three days so special:

“At a literary festival a few years ago, Howard Jacobson was asked, not for the first time, whether he sees himself as the “English Philip Roth”. “No,” he replied, “I’m the Jewish Jane Austen”. The elegant, Regency surroundings of the Queensberry hotel in Bath seemed a perfect place to quiz him about this, and about his many (Jewish) comedies of manners. But the tone of our conversation veered from Austen’s polite irony to an existential “howl”, the title of his most recent book.

On the first evening, Jacobson told us about his emotional response to the events of 7 October 2023 and how he viewed the reverberations through British society. We talked about the specific peculiarities of being a Mancunian Jew: his northern humour punctuated his in-person comments with the same wryness as on-the-page, when he discussed the negotiation he made with “his truth” when writing the memoir Mother’s Boy.

The best part of teaching at a Jewish Literary Foundation event is the audience. Exceptionally well-read (and having travelled from far and wide: South Africa, America and around the UK) they quizzed him on everything from winning the Booker with The Finkler Question, to writing Pussy, to his views on Shylock, and the conversations continued over dinner and well into the evening.

Over the following two days, we set Howard’s writing alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Reuben Sachs, by Oscar Wilde’s protégé Amy Levy, who had perhaps more of a claim to the title of the “Jewish Jane Austen” than Jacobson. We compared these Anglo-Jewish / Jew-ish books with the uber-Americanism of Philip Roth, while contrasting the muscularity of language in Portnoy’s Complaint to the sociological precision of The Plot Against America when exploring male Jewish coming of age and descriptions of returning to home landscapes. We also thought about how we negotiate both secular and religious Jewish identity in literature, standing Roth alongside Chaim Potok, and close-reading two contemporary poets: the American C.K. Williams and the British Joanne Limburg.

We left the retreat with more questions – about what it means to write as a Jew about Jews, about the present moment, about the differences between American and British writing and about what makes an Anglo-Jewish book – than we did answers, perhaps the most ubiquitously Jewish thing about our time together.”

Aviva Dautch, Executive Director of Jewish Renaissance and award-winning poet
BROWSE OUR UPCOMING EVENTS (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/events-list)

** NEW ON THE JLF PLAYER
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With new videos every week, don’t miss our extensive collection of talks and debates on everything from art, history, literature, philosophy, science, religion and more - free and available worldwide.
Jonathan Miller: Drama and Perception (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/videos/jonathan-miller-drama-and-perception)
Hadley Freeman: Good Girls (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/videos/hadley-freeman-good-girls)
Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/videos/surviving-mengeles-auschwitz)
BROWSE THE PLAYER (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/jlf-player)

EXPLORE THE JEWISH LITERARY FOUNDATION (https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/)
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https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/

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