Alfred Kerr was an influential writer and journalist in the Weimar Republic before the Nazis seized power and subsequently declared him a target for his criticism against the party. In celebration of the publication of New York and London: A Journey After the Great War by Alfred Kerr, Ralph Blumenthal will join the Leo Baeck Institute and Berlinica Publishing to discuss Kerr's work as a Weimar author in 1922s New York and in exile.

After the First World War, the Berlin theater critic Alfred Kerr travels to America and Great Britain. Kerr, who calls New York the “greatest city in the world”, visits Broadway theaters and Wall Street, marvels at the subway, Times Square and Grand Central Station. He writes about Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”, talks to the satirist Henry Louis Mencken, the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman —who later became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow—and Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. In London, he meets the poet George Bernard Shaw. But the book, written concisely and wittily, is much more than just a travelogue. After the war, when the mood in America and England was extremely hostile towards Germany, when German professors were dismissed and propaganda films agitated against Germany, Kerr is on a mission to explore the situation and to ask for understanding and help for the fragile Weimar democracy.

Date and Time: Thu, Sep 24, 2026, 6:30 PM–8:30 PM EDT

Location: Leo Baeck Institute, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, U.S.A., (212) 744-6400

Free Event, in person

More Information: https://www.lbi.org/events/kerr/