Good journalists are endlessly curious and should be endlessly enthusiastic. My features run the gamut from politics to travel writing. They all have one thing in common – to transmit that enthusiasm to the reader.
McMafia Episode 4 for JC by Jenni Frazer We are halfway through the BBC’s gripping thriller, McMafia, but I regret to report that the Russian Family Godman has got no better at being Jewish than in previous episodes. Sadly, they don’t appear to know the difference between the toast “l’chaim” and wishing someone “long life”, […]
Mcmafia Jan 7 episode fromJenni Frazer Some people’s ideas of a gift are not yours or mine. I wouldn’t, for example, offer you a badly beaten up and chained individual and offer him as a present in exchange for a word in someone else’s shell-like. Nevertheless, that was the goodie offered to Alex Godman (James […]
Jaffe obit Dr Ephraim Jaffe, born Manchester, 26.11.1920, died 30.8.2017 aged 96 Dr Ephraim Jaffe was undoubtedly one of the best-known doctors in north Manchester, but although he had a long, distinguished and wide-ranging medical career, he was probably better known — and loved — for his communal work. Dr Jaffe, tall, softly-spoken and usually […]
McMafia Episode 7 for the JC January 2018 I am beginning to feel, after seven episodes of McMafia, that even I could manage a little Russian vocab — and thus can be forgiven for laughing when James Norton’s Alex earnestly tells a member of a Mexican cartel that his unique selling point in this Game […]
McMafia review for the Jewish Chronicle published January 5 2018 Well, who knew that a caviar knife could inflict so much damage? Plainly the rabbonim were on to something when it was decreed that sturgeon caviar was not kosher, thus ensuring that no observant Jew was ever going to be done away with by the […]
Jewish Britain on film for Times of Israel from Jenni Frazer posted December 28 2017 The images tumble from the screen, in glorious Technicolor or flickering black-and-white. The quality is highly variable and so too is the subject matter, ranging from the utterly banal to the high-flown. And yet, there is a connecting thread in […]
Women in the IDF for the JC published November 2017 Any visitor sees it instantly: young women in military uniform, sometimes in skirts, but mostly in trousers and tough-terrain boots, striding along the roads or travelling on the buses and trains, heaving their rucksacks onto the luggage racks and plugging in their mobile phones. The […]
Liron Shekel for the JC by Jenni Frazer posted December 2017 There is a moment in JT Rogers’ massive hit play, “Oslo”, where two of the characters — of necessity — break into Hebrew, as they mutter instructions to each other about how best to proceed in the delicate negotiations that formed the 1993 Oslo […]
For the Jewish Chronicle posted December 23 2017 Seeing traditional circular mud huts at the roadside in northern Ghana came as something of a shock. It was no less shocking to see classrooms which would have been out of place in Victorian England, devoid of facilities save for a miserable collection of dilapidated cracked wooden […]
Ghana for JN December 2017 by Jenni Frazer One by one, the cheerful rowdy voices of 16 high-achieving Jewish students quietened down as they came face-to-face with some of the shocking realities of the developing world. Lauren Keiles, a student reading international relations at the University of Leeds, put it succinctly: “Tikkun Olam (the principle […]