The Secret Jewish History of James Bond

The Secret Jewish History of James Bond

Thursday at 10:00am PDT

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Sidney Reilly (c. 1873–1925) is one of the most colorful and best–known spies of the twentieth century. Emerging from humble beginnings in southern Russia, Reilly was an inventive multilingual businessman and conman who enjoyed espionage as a sideline. By the early twentieth century he was working as an agent for Scotland Yard and spent World War I in the United States, brokering major arms deals for tsarist Russia before becoming a professional spy, joining the ranks of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service. Said to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s iconic James Bond character, Reilly was simultaneously married to three or four women and had mistresses galore. Sifting through the reality and the myth of Reilly’s life, historian Benny Morris offers a fascinating portrait of one of the most intriguing figures from the golden age of spies in a riveting discussion with scholar Jonathan Dobrer. Preorder the book HERE. 

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Benny Morris was born in Israel in 1948 and was educated in Jerusalem, New York, and Cambridge, where he received his PhD in modern European history. He was a journalist at the Jerusalem Post during 1978-1990, taught at Ben-Gurion University between 1997 and 2015, and at Georgetown University 2015-2018. In 2019 he published The Thirty-Year Genocide, Turkey's Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, and his new book, to appear in October 2022, is Sidney Reilly, Master Spy (Yale University Press). He taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Munich University, Dartmouth College, University of Maryland, and the University of Florida. He has published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian among other publications.

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Jonathan Dobrer teaches Current Events at American Jewish University and has taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is a graduate of USC and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He studied philosophy in Vienna and spent two years in the Peace Corps in Tunisia. Jonathan also specializes in Comparative Religion, specifically, how Christianity developed from Hebrew scriptures, stories and archetypes; and how Islam grew from both Judaism and primitive Christianity.

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