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 June 30 2022 The best-read book of the 20th century: the extraordinary story of Anne Frank’s Diary A new book traces the history of an iconic Holocaust book which became a publishing phenomenon BY JENNI FRAZER If you were looking for one name to sum up the enormity of Holocaust suffering, you […]
For Jewish News May 2022 In a quiet suburban road in London, a cheerful academic is rejoicing in talking about the things he loves best — an extraordinary collection of Judaica, charting the history of Anglo-Jewry. Privileged visitors are faced with a cornucopia of objects, each one with its own fascinating story, both of its […]
For the JC The Prison Minyan by Jonathan Stone Lightning Books £8.99 (pub date January 13 2022) Rare is the book which is so delicious that you want immediately to read it all over again, but Jonathan Stone’s glorious The Prison Minyan is just that. Just the title makes you want to dive into the […]
Eighty years ago a small group of Jewish men and women embarked on an extraordinary mission, which they might have thought at the time was doomed — to save from the Nazis thousands of documents, books and artefacts, detailing pre-war Jewish life. The group, who became known as the Paper Brigade, would surely have been […]
Me and You for the JC December 17 2021 Michael and Jonathan Goldstein, 58 and 55 respectively, are brothers and big machers in the Jewish community. Michael is president of the United Synagogue and Jonathan has just stepped down from chairing the Jewish Leadership Council. There is a third, younger brother, Daniel, who lives in […]
For the JC December 2021 Twenty-one things we learn about Mel Brooks from his memoir, All About Me 1. At 95, Melvin Kaminsky has the soul of a nine-year-old boy. His descriptions of his early Brooklyn Depression-era childhood — brought up by his widowed mother and his three older brothers, Irving, Lenny and Bernie — […]
For the JC Oct 29 2021 The broadcaster and presenter Rachel Riley has a sunny personality which manifests itself in encouragement — even if she privately thinks you are making a mess of things. Thus, when we meet via Zoom and I confess to her that I got stuck at trigonometry in her debut mathematics […]
For the Times of Israel September 29 2021 At a time when “so many governments are either not fighting racism, or actively encouraging it”, the BBC is about to screen an extraordinary four-part TV series, examining an almost forgotten aspect of antisemitism in Britain — the challenges to fascism in the early 1960s. Ridley Road, […]
Leonard Cohen review for JC Sept 2021 It ought to be admitted that even for the hard-core Leonard Cohen fan — among whose ranks I count myself — yet another book on an aspect of his life makes the heart sink a little. So I approached Harry Freedman’s “Leonard Cohen, The Mystical Roots of Genius”, […]
For the JC, August 20 2021 Go into any bookshop, or cast an eye online, and there they will be — the scores of titles, fiction and non-fiction, all gathered together under one subject line — stories of the Holocaust. There are up-coming films too, on TV and in cinemas, such as the defiantly gory […]