Jenni Frazer

Columns

Columns are a difficult trick to pull off, not least if elsewhere in the journalistic field you are trying to report issues objectively. A column which works ought to leave the reader feeling better informed but also, perhaps, pulls together opinions and views which are in the wind. One thing you will never find me writing: confessional, first-person columns. Not my thing at all.


Palex versus Limmud: Limmud wins

Column for Jewish News July 9 2017 The woman sitting two rows in front of me at the Palestine Expo was wearing a designer keffiyah in chic red and white. Readers, she looked ridiculous, as did many of the pasty-skinned white English fellow travellers who bulked out the sessions at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre […]

  • 10 July, 2017

Manchester in my blood

Column JN issue June 2 2017 from Jenni Frazer My grandparents came to Manchester from — supposedly, but we don’t really know — Kiev and Berdichev, outposts of the Pale of Settlement in 19th century Greater Russia. Unlike most of their contemporaries, they brought their parents with them, rather than the other way round. The […]

  • 27 May, 2017

Protest and when to do it

Column for Jewish News December 17 2015 by Jenni Frazer Today’s sermon, o best beloveds. is about protest and counter-protest – when to do it and when, frankly, you might as well not bother. On Sunday, a somewhat bizarre protest took place in New York. As far as I can gather – and it has […]

  • 17 February, 2016

Censor and sensibility

Column for the Jewish News July 17 2015 Like an endlessly weeping wound, the issue of boycott and delegitimisation of Israel continues to trouble all those who care about the Jewish state. At last month’s Israel strategy conference, a project of the Jewish News, it was all many speakers could talk about. Cynics might usefully […]

  • 14 July, 2015

Watch out for loved-up Abbas

Column for Jewish News May 22 2015 by Jenni Frazer Readers of a certain age will be aware of the injunction “Always keep ahold of nurse, For fear of finding something worse”. It comes from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children but given Belloc’s reprehensible attitude to Jews, it’s probably the only thing of his […]

  • 20 May, 2015

Southampton: basic error

Column for the Jewish News, April 17 2015 This week I crave readers’ indulgence for returning to the painful subject of the Southampton Israel conference. Who said this, in The Guardian, in April 2010? “To argue – as an academic or in an academic setting – that the state of Israel should be destroyed seems, […]

  • 20 April, 2015

Southampton’s hate-fest

Column Jewish News issue April 3 by Jenni Frazer Tonight at Seder, many of us will have questions to ask about freedom. Freedom for our people who escaped from Egypt; freedom for 21st century Jews to live in peace; and, inevitably, freedom of speech and the power of language. Last week I was involved in […]

  • 2 April, 2015

Four years is too long to wait

Jewish News March 27 2015 By Jenni Frazer Outside in the cold spring sunshine, lines of tourists snaked down a central London pavement. Inside the dark brown artificial gloom of a central London hotel, lines of delegates snaked around the morning coffee stall, muttering to each other at the price of an espresso (“£3!”) but […]

  • 26 March, 2015

Of stunts and bad behaviour

Jewish News issue March 13 2015 by Jenni Frazer Jonathan Kalmus, a reporter whom I much admire, decided to see what would happen if he followed in the footsteps of Zvika Klein, the Israeli journalist who was abused in Paris when he spent 10 hours walking around wearing his kippah in public. The stunt – […]

  • 16 March, 2015

Bibi, the bottler

Jewish News column issue February 27 2015 OPINION: Bibi, don’t bottle out of making Israel a country I’d want to live in – Jewish News http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-bibi-dont-bottle-making-israel-country-id-want-live/ 1/6 February 27, 2015 By Jenni Frazer I feel, as perhaps do many readers, in something of a Jewish overload. Never was the saying [with apologies to the title […]

  • 2 March, 2015