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Faculty of Divinity & Online (via Zoom) Lightfoot Room
Faculty of Divinity, Sidgwick Site, off West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BSSociologist Dr Georgette Bennett discusses her new book, a biography of Gary “Pips” Phillips. With an Aryan mother and Jewish father, Pips could have escaped much of the Holocaust’s horrors. Instead, he made a fateful decision to become a bar mitzvah just as the Nuremberg Laws were enacted.
Cover of Half-Jew—Full Life, Georgette Bennett’s 2026 biography of Gary “Pips” Phillips, published by Heresy Press.
About
Listen as Dr Bennett reads from Half Jew—Full Life: The unlikely journey of a voluntary Jew from Nazi persecution to the American dream (Heresy Press, Cambridge MA, 2026). The reading will be followed by a conversation with Professor Esra Özyürek.
This event is hosted by Cambridge Interfaith Programme at the Faculty of Divinity. All are welcome.
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About the book
From Berlin to the Bronx, from Holocaust survivor to American success story, Dr Georgette Bennett offers a riveting, fast-paced biography tracing 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.
About the author
Dr Georgette Bennett is a TED speaker, an award-winning sociologist, widely published author, popular lecturer, and former broadcast journalist. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact (“Bennett joins 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 served with the US State Department Religion and Foreign Policy working group on conflict mitigation, tasked with developing recommendations for the U.S. Secretary of State on countering religion-based violence. She is Past Chair of the Jewish Funders Network and serves on the Board of Third Way. In addition, she is an Advisory Board member for the International Rescue Committee and the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Bennett was a winner of a 2020 AARP Purpose Prize for her work with MFA. She is involved with dozens of organizations, having served on many boards, and been honored by numerous organizations.
A longstanding friend of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, Dr Bennett last visited in 2023 when she and Jerry White were promoting their book, Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence.
About the chair
Professor Esra Özyürek is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge and academic director of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.
Esra joined the University of Cambridge after having taught at the London School of Economics and University of California, San Diego. Her research explores the tension between the universalism and particularism of globally appealing religious and post-religious belief and value systems.
Esra has published widely, including Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust memory and Muslim belonging in postwar Germany (Stanford 2023), available also in a German language edition Stellvertreter der Schuld (Klett-Cotta 2025), Being German, becoming Muslim: Race, religion, and conversion in the New Europe (2015), and Nostalgia for the modern: State secularism and everyday politics in Turkey (2006).