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 Jewish News September 14 2018 It’s any suburban kitchen and two parents are arguing — with evident love and affection — with their grown-up son. The audience watching the film is laughing with delighted recognition. For this is not just any suburban kitchen: it is the home of the recently knighted Sir Ben […]
For the Jewish Chronicle, September 6 2018 I’m sitting in the reading room of the National Archives at Kew, waiting for a file. And suddenly I think that perhaps no-one has looked at this file for just over 100 years. Wow. I am really excited. I’ve been to the National Archives numerous times, but never […]
For the Times of Israel posted September 2 2018 We Are British Jews for the Times of Israel by Jenni Frazer August 29 2018 Eight British Jews went to Israel with the BBC in February. One has already made aliyah, and a second is making plans to do the same. The eight men and women […]
June Jacobs by Jenni Frazer for the JC July 2018 In the 80s and 90s, if you were at a Jewish public meeting and June Jacobs walked in, you knew you were in for a treat. Inevitably, June’s contribution — from a defiantly left-of-centre perspective — raised the hackles of many present. Some, it is […]
Righteous Gentiles for the JN July 2018 On March 29, 1946, her 16th birthday, Lily Pohlmann arrived in Britain on the first of three rescue transports, organised by the indomitable Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, under the auspices of the Chief Rabbi. On Thursday, Lily and members of her family joined nearly 100 people at Hoop Lane […]
Barak for JN May 29 2018 by Jenni Frazer Ehud Barak’s memoir has a what-it-says-on-the-tin title: “My Country, My Life, Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace”. Israel’s 10th prime minister, from 1999 to 2001, is still, at 76, the joint most highly decorated soldier in Israel’s history, and it is clear that the one-time kibbutznik […]
For the Times of Israel posted May 29 2018 Without doubt, few men can declare, with a straight face, “Marilyn Monroe was my babysitter”. And yet this is the unique boast of Joshua Greene, an American photographer and digital film restorer, who has achieved the seemingly impossible by restoring the thousands of pictures of the […]
For the Jewish Chonicle, published April 27 2018 Leonard Crystall’s face, still rounded with teenage puppy fat, stares solemnly from the cover of Michael Greisman’s remarkable new book, Jews in Uniform, his sailor hat at a jaunty angle, giving no hint of the tragedy which was to befall him. Crystall, who died aged just 18, […]
Macedonia for JC by Jenni Frazer March 2018 Ninety-eight per cent of the Jews of Macedonia were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust. Yet, 75 years after their deportation, an extraordinary museum has opened in Skopje, Macedonia, a joint project of the tiny Jewish present-day community and the Macedonian government. The Holocaust Memorial Centre, designed […]
McMafia Ep 8 for JC from Jenni Frazer February 9 2018 It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves, as McMafia disappears into the collective hive memory, how we started out just two months ago: a Russian Jewish family living in London, with a criminal past back in Moscow, and an apparently squeaky clean heir who was […]