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.
For the Times of Israel July 20 2020 Britain’s Jewish community has become the first in the world to set up a Commission on Racial Inclusivity in the wake of the George Floyd murder in America. And the man in charge, journalist Stephen Bush, says he is now considering finding a synagogue for himself and […]
Mrs America for JC by Jenni Frazer July 2020 There is a scene in the compelling TV series, Mrs America, in which several women are gathered in Bella Abzug’s home in New York and — not being Jewish — are shaking their heads with bemusement at the buffet food she has prepared. It’s every kind […]
For the JC July 13 2020 by Sarah Harris (JF) “Predicting anything at the moment feels like a mug’s game” — the speaker is Raymond Simonson, chief executive of JW3, the Jewish community centre for London. He may be right: except that the closure of JW3’s flagship restaurant and café, Zest, has led to a […]
For the JC June 26 2020 “There’s a lot of hate out there — and he knows how to use it”. Such words could easily be applied to today’s America, but in fact they are the key to an extraordinary TV series, The Plot Against America, based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel. Plot 2020-style has […]
Yad Vashem lecture for JN June 2020 In 1953, when Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance centre, opened, there was already an ambitious, if impossible-sounding, plan in place — to collect and document the names of every one of the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah. The recording of the names, as Yad Vashem’s head […]
For the JC June 15 2020 Prince Andrew: Epstein and the Palace — by Jenni Frazer In every generation, we might accept, there are Jews whose names we utter with pride — and there are those whom we would rather the wider world did not identify as Jews, because their behaviour puts them so far […]
Prince Andrew: Epstein and the Palace, for the JC— by Jenni Frazer June 2020 In every generation, we might accept, there are Jews whose names we utter with pride — and there are those whom we would rather the wider world did not identify as Jews, because their behaviour puts them so far beyond the […]
For the JC April 2020 By any measure, writing about the birth of the state of Israel is a project fraught with — well, if not danger, then plenty of pitfalls. But playwright Steve Waters, professor of scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia, has entered with enthusiasm on the subject and seems to have […]
For the JC May 2020 “You know that feeling,” says the American comedian Sarge, “when something happens and you just have to call someone and tell them? And I thought, who can I call?” The answer was quite as left-field as Sarge’s entire life: chock-full of incident. He made his dramatic phone call to a […]
Esther Safran Foer for the Jewish Chronicle April 2020 Esther Safran Foer — though she will tell you in her book that she is very different from her mother — is a bit of a magpie, a collector, and a hoarder. The collections range from pieces of dirt carefully preserved in a series of Ziploc […]