EJCC Live! Tim Franks and Stephanie Mitchell in conversation
About
“The Lines We Draw” is a moving journey through a Jewish family history from BBC Newshour presenter Tim Franks.Please note that this event will NOT be recorded.
Tim Franks spent years as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. During that time, he was attacked as a self-hating Jew and as an Islamophobe – as a tool of competing, malign agendas. He always tried to respond with a journalist’s detached curiosity, drawing a clear line between his identity and his work. Up to the point that he asked himself: is that necessary? Is it such a combustible mix? And beyond the judgments of others: what does it mean to be Jewish?
It was a question he struggled to answer. As a child in 1970s Birmingham, Tim Franks was a practising Jew with hardly any relations or sense of lineage. But decades later, a chance encounter triggered his reporter’s urge. And so he embarked on a search for his ancestral roots, from Constantinople to Curaçao, from Amsterdam to the death camps, from Lithuania to Downing Street.
Framing each part of his journey through what he has learned as a journalist, Franks discovers ancestors who all speak to a part of the Jewish story: there are the refugees and the risk-takers; the artists, polemicists, rabbis, soldiers and revolutionaries; the families broken by faith, love and murderous hate; there is even a route to the Conservative Party’s “unlikeliest” leader.
This book is a moving, deeply empathetic memoir which encourages us all to confront the lines we draw. In searching for what it is to be Jewish, Franks discovers what it means to take a stand and write about the world.
Date
Wednesday 22 April 2026 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM (UTC+00)Location
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EJCC Live! Tim Franks and Stephanie Mitchell in conversation
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