Every year, the Mandel JCC, with the help of generous sponsors and partners, celebrates authors, books, and ideas. Topics relate to Jewish life, history, business, religion and more. Author presentations are accompanied by lively Q&A sessions with audience members. Book Sales provided by our partner Mac’s Backs. Support the Book festival and a local business, buy your signed copies today!
Book Fest Co-Chairs: Shelly Lewis, Lisa Mayers, Beth Rosenthal.

Schedule:

7:30pm: Book Festival: The Last Kings of Shanghai

By the 1930s, the Sassoons had been doing business in China for a century, rivaled in wealth and influence by only one other dynasty—the Kadoories. These two Jewish families, both originally from Baghdad, stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than 175 years profiting from the Opium Wars, surviving Japanese occupation, and losing nearly everything as the Communists swept into power. In The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families participated in an economic boom that opened China to the world. The book lays bare the moral compromises of the two families—and their exceptional foresight success and generosity. At the height of World War II, they joined together to rescue and protect 18,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism. As the United States confronts China's rise and China grapples with the pressures of breakneck modernization and global power, the long-hidden odysseys of the Sassoons and the Kadoories hold a key to understanding the present moment.

Jonathan Kaufman:

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has written and reported on China for thirty years for The Boston Globe, where he covered the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square; The Wall Street Journal, where he served as China bureau chief from 2002 to 2005; and Bloomberg News. He is the author of A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. He is the director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

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