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 JC by Jenni Frazer It is a question asked repeatedly about the horrors of the Nazi genocide against the Jews: why, once the details had become known to the Allies, did they not destroy the railway lines and then bomb Auschwitz? In a remarkable and painful programme to be screened on BBC2 on […]
For the JC August 29 2019 I’m in a members’ club in Soho and the staff are behaving in a way I have rarely seen in such spaces, running up and downstairs, cooing and making happy little faces. The object of this behaviour is not an animal or a pretty baby, but a petite woman […]
For the JC August 23 2019 About four years ago the writer Thomas Harding and his daughter Sam were walking around central London. Harding pointed out building after building — landmarks such as the Trocadero, hotels such as the Cumberland and the Strand Palace — which had once belonged to his family company, J Lyons […]
For the JC August 5 2019 This is the story I hoped never to have to write, an appreciation — in every sense of the word — of my dearest late boss, Geoffrey Paul. GDP, as he was known throughout the Furnival Street headquarters of the Jewish Chronicle, was one of the kindest men I […]
For the Times of Israel sent June 4 2019 With the air of a triumphant conjurer, Benjamin Dreyer, the copy editors’ copy editor — he is the veteran copy chief of Random House publishers — says that in his new book, “Dreyer’s English”, there are two important Yiddish words. “There’s a ‘geshrei’ and there’s an […]
For the JC June 6 2019 Benjamin Dreyer for JC by Jenni Frazer June 3 2019 On a hot summer morning by the edge of the Thames, the doyen of American English, Benjamin Dreyer, leans forward and confesses that he really wanted to be a rabbi. Instead, he agrees, he has partially achieved his ambition […]
For the Jewish News magazine May 2019 There is a chilling, but prescient, moment in a unique BBC film made in the early 90s when the Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara invited the TV cameras into their home. Their children, toddlers Yair and Avner, are running around until Yair decides to play […]
Tesco Cohen for the JC May 10 2019 At the end of his long life, it was difficult to get a sense of the hard-nosed and ruthless businessman “Tesco Cohen” must once have been in his heyday. When I interviewed him for the JC back in 1978 on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Sir […]
Book review for the Jewish Chronicle posted April 17 2019 In some ways, I have to admire Israeli Nir Hezroni — or his agent. To have persuaded a publisher to destroy trees for his new book Last Instructions Point Blank, £8.99 (translated by Steven Cohen), and his previous outing, Three Envelopes, takes chutzpah of an […]
For the Jewish News April 19 2019 Most people, after a debilitating stroke, would be concentrating hard on looking after themselves and recovering as best they can. But Cheryl Sklan, a busy professional — she was a social worker, a psychotherapist and a life coach — is not most people. She had a massive stroke […]