talk: the shocking mr silver
18 March 2026 | 6pm
Joseph Lis, aka Joe Silver (and 25 other aliases), was a Jewish psychopath, police informer, gambling banker, pimp, sex trafficker, safe-cracker, thief, spy and serial murderer from the Polish town of Kielce.
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Arriving in London when he was 16, he frequented the barber shops, boxing rings and brothels of Whitechapel, jammed with Jewish refugees from Russia. He took to thieving and prostitution with remarkable aptitude. Violence, threats and intimidation were his stock in trade and prostitutes were brutally beaten and raped to enforce his demands. Later, Silver’s criminal activities extended to New York, Philadelphia, Cape Town, Kimberley, Johannesburg, Windhoek, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Brussels and Paris.
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South African historian Charles van Onselen’s book The Fox and the Flies: Joe Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath revealed that Silver fitted the profile of Jack the Ripper, spending the rest of his life trying to avoid detection. The story of Joe Silver is not just one of a remarkable psychopath but an insight into the Jewish experience from 1881 to 1941, when millions of Jews fled the Russian Empire for the New World and some fell into the faultlines of criminality.
Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist, writer and historian. He trained in medicine at UCT then in psychiatry in Sydney, Australia. He holds positions as Clinical Associate Professor at Western Sydney University and University of Wollongong, and Research Associate, History Department, Stellenbosch University. He is the author of six books and numerous articles on history of medicine and psychiatry, crime and genocide. He was consulted by Charles van Onselen in the writing of “The Fox and Flies” the story of Joe Silver. He has appeared in documentaries on Adolf Hitler, the psychiatrist Aubrey Levin and nurses who kill. He has a podcast series entitled Frontal Lobotomy and is writing a biography of Professor Konrad Kweit, the leading Australian Holocaust historian. His ambition to be a standup comic has been unsuccessful to date.