Tuesday 24th March 2026
From 6pm, LSE Faith Centre, SAW 2.02, The Desert Room
Join us in hearing from Georgette Bennett on her recently published book 'Half-Jew - Full Life : The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream.
Meet Our Speaker
TED speaker Dr. Georgette Bennett is an award-winning sociologist who has practiced mostly in non-academic settings. She is a widely published author, popular lecturer, and former broadcast journalist. An innovative and entrepreneurial leader, she is an active philanthropist focusing on conflict resolution, human rights, humanitarian diplomacy, and interreligious relations.
In 2013, Bennett founded the Multifaith Alliance (MFA) which has since worked to raise awareness and mobilize more than $630 million worth of humanitarian aid benefitting almost four million Syrian war victims. MFA is also working Ukraine, Turkey, and Gaza, where it has delivered aid to more than 100,000 households.
In 1992, Bennett founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the go-to organization for combatting religious prejudice. She is a co-founder of the Global Covenant of Religions/Global Covenant Partners, which focuses on delegitimizing the use of religion to justify violence and extremism. To that end, Bennett served in the U.S. State Department Religion and Foreign Policy initiative’s working group on conflict mitigation, tasked with developing recommendations for the U.S. Secretary of State on countering religion-based violence.
In her earlier career as a criminologist, she did pioneering work in what is now known as Community Policing, consulted on criminal justice staffing studies for the U.S. Department of Justice, served as Personal Consultant to the New York City Police Commissioner, and managed the budget for all New York City’s criminal justice operations at its Office of Management and Budget. Bennett is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Past Chair of the Jewish Funders Network. She serves on the Board of Third Way and is an Advisory Board member for the International Rescue Committee and the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Among myriad recognitions, Bennett was a winner of the 2020 AARP Purpose Prize for her work with MFA. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact, where she was cited, along with Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Najat Arafat Khelil, and Susan Rice as “women who helped shape the course of modern American foreign policy and human rights.”
Bennett’s three latest books are Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence; Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By: How One Woman Confronted the Greatest Humanitarian Crisis of Our Time; and Half-Jew, Full Life – The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream. An earlier book, Crimewarps: The Future of Crime in America, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
From Berlin to the Bronx, from Holocaust survivor to American success story, this riveting, fast-paced biography traces the extraordinary life of Gary “Pips” Phillips who defied the odds at every turn. With an Aryan mother and Jewish father, Pips could have escaped much of the Holocaust’s horrors. Instead, he made a fateful decision at age 13 to become a bar mitzvah just as the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, effectively choosing to be labeled a Jew under Nazi rule. Pips’s wartime experience is marked by daring escapes, improbable rescues, and survival while hiding deep within Nazi Berlin. Captured four times, he escaped thrice, choosing to remain in Nazi custody the fourth time as there was nowhere to run in bombed-out Berlin. At his place of confinement, he met his future wife, Olga Horvath, who had been imprisoned after surviving Auschwitz and the Death March to Bergen Belsen. After their marriage in chaotic post-war Berlin, they emigrated to the USA to start a new life.
Arriving in New York with nothing, Pips rose from waiter to co-owner of the world’s largest photo agency—despite never owning a camera. Unlike Pips, Olga was unable to escape the shadow of her Holocaust experiences, and in a horrifying twist, she threw herself off the roof of their gleaming luxury high-rise after more than 50 years of marriage, leaving Pips grief-stricken, but also able to reinvent himself one more time. This cinematic life brims with chance, love, loss, resilience, and reinvention, culminating in a poignant exploration of Jewish identity, memory, and legacy. Pips’s story is a tribute to the power of choice, endurance, and the human will to belong.
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