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.
My Father’s House review for JC by Jenni Frazer Feb 16 2023 Joseph O’Connor’s new novel, My Father’s House, is two things: a compelling, twisty thriller, whose outcome is hard to guess; and an exquisitely rendered piece of literature, from a masterful writer. The novel is based on the extraordinary true story of a Catholic […]
For The Circuit by Jenni Frazer Jan 2023 Almost 120 years ago a German Jewish explorer, Hermann Burckhardt, was travelling in the Middle East, talking to local leaders and taking photographs. Among the iconic pictures was what is thought to be the first photographic image of the founding father of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed Bin […]
For the JC January 25 2023 I’m about to interview a woman who is nearly 100 years old. But as our Zoom screen opens, for a moment I’m not sure if I’ve got the right person. Sitting on a comfortable couch in a New York apartment is Stella Levi, smartly dressed and made up, sitting […]
For the JC books pages January 30 2023 Most of us, I suppose, are used to biographies which take a chronological view of the subject’s life, perhaps beginning with the central thing which brought them to fame. Norman Lebrecht, however, in this glorious study of Beethoven, has taken a different approach. Almost unrivalled in the […]
For the JC January 2023 by Jenni Frazer It took the writer Michael Frank more than a year to decide that “this thing was bigger than I was” — the fascinating weekly conversations he was having with a woman he dubbed “my modern-day Scheherazade”. Stella Levi, the Scheherazade in question, was a mere stripling of […]
For Jewish Insider Dec 23 2022 It is likely to come as a surprise to those familiar with Robert Rinder — a man almost ubiquitous on Britain’s TV screens — that he still retains membership of his legal chambers, and indeed keeps a pigeonhole in the City of London building of 2 Hare Court. Because […]
For Jewish Insider Washington DC October 20 2022 It’s probably safe to say that no Friday night Shabbat dinner invitation ever landed quite like Londoner Dalia Lister’s: You’re not coming here to sit in a corner of the room with your friends, the invite warned, adding, if you’re not going to participate, you’re not welcome […]
For the JC Sep 2022 More than 40 years ago George Clare published his Holocaust memoir, Last Waltz in Vienna, one of the very first of what might be called Shoah-realism. In its wake came a veritable deluge of Holocaust-related non-fiction and fiction, sometimes hard to tell the two apart. Clare’s book suffered, in my […]
For the JC August 2022 Maror by Lavie Tidhar Head of Zeus £20 Every few years an Israeli writer produces a blockbuster book, designed to set readers by the ears and occasionally readjust what they know — or think they know — about the Jewish state. Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, tracing […]
For JC colour mag August 2022 When Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild died suddenly and unexpectedly on his 59th birthday, in December 1898, the JC devoted many columns to praising this most unusual man — an MP, a Justice of the Peace, a deputy lieutenant and High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, an ardent Freemason and a director […]