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Jonathan Freedland

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Jonathan Freedland
Freedland in 2013
Born (1967-02-25) 25 February 1967 (age 57)[1]
Other namesSam Bourne
Alma materWadham College, Oxford
OccupationJournalist
SpouseSarah Peters[1]
Websitejonathanfreedland.com
twitter.com/freedland
theguardian.com/profile/jonathanfreedland

Jonathan Saul Freedland (born 25 February 1967)[1] is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and used to write for the Jewish Chronicle until, along with Hadley Freeman, David Aaronovitch, David Baddiel and others, he resigned dramatically in September 2024.[2]

Freedman also presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View; and writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.[3]

Early life

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The youngest of three children and the only son of a Jewish couple, biographer and journalist Michael Freedland, and Israeli-born Sara Hocherman,[4] he was educated at University College School, a boys' independent school in Hampstead, London. As a child, Freedland periodically accompanied his father for broadcasting work. On one occasion, his father was interviewing Eric Morecambe, who comically assumed the 10 year-old Freedland was married.[5] After a gap year working on a kibbutz in Israel with the Labour Zionist Habonim Dror (where Freedland had been mentored by Mark Regev, and Freedland was in turn, a mentor to Sacha Baron Cohen[6]), he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Wadham College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he was editor of Cherwell, the student newspaper.

Journalism

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Freedland began his Fleet Street career at the short-lived Sunday Correspondent. In 1990 he joined the BBC as a news reporter across radio and television, including for The World at One and Today on Radio 4. In 1992, he was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship[7] on The Washington Post, serving as a staff writer on national news. He was Washington Correspondent for The Guardian from 1993 until 1997, when he returned to London as an editorial writer and columnist.

Between 2002 and 2004, Freedland was an occasional columnist for the Daily Mirror and from 2005 to 2007 he wrote a weekly column for the London Evening Standard. He wrote a monthly column for The Jewish Chronicle, until ceasing in September 2024 following its publication of news reports said to have been fabricated.[8] He has also been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek and The New Republic.

Freedland was named "Columnist of the Year" in the 2002 What the Papers Say awards and in 2008 was awarded the David Watt Prize for Journalism,[9] in recognition of his essay "Bush's Amazing Achievement", published in The New York Review of Books.[10] Nominated on seven occasions, Freedland was awarded a special Orwell Prize in May 2014 for his journalism.[11][12] In 2016, he won the "Commentariat of the Year" prize at the Comment Awards.[13]

Freedland was executive editor of the opinion section of The Guardian from May 2014 till early 2016 and continues to write a Saturday column for it.[14][15]

In November 2019, Freedland apologised for making a "very bad error" in falsely reporting that a shortlisted Labour prospective parliamentary candidate had been fined for making antisemitic remarks on Facebook. He attributed the mistaken identification by confusing two lawyers with the same name to a "previously reliable Labour source" whose information he had "passed on too hastily".[16][17]

Author

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Freedland has published twelve books: three non-fiction works under his own name and nine novels, eight of them under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

Bring Home the Revolution: The case for a British Republic (1998), Freedland's first book, argued that Britain should reclaim the revolutionary ideals it exported to America in the 18th century, and undergo a constitutional and cultural overhaul. The book won a W. Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction and was later adapted into a two-part series for BBC Television.

Jacob's Gift (2005) is a memoir recounting the lives of three generations of his own Jewish family as well as exploring wider questions of identity and belonging.[18] In 2008, he broadcast a two-part series for BBC Radio 4 – British Jews and the Dream of Zion – as well as two TV documentaries for BBC Four: How to be a Good President[19] and President Hollywood.

The Righteous Men (2006), is a religious thriller published under the Bourne pen name. It is about a news reporter whose life is disrupted when his wife is kidnapped while he is reporting a story of a militia man found dead. As more murders of 'righteous men' happen across the globe, Will soon finds himself in the middle of a plot to bring about nothing less than Judgement Day.

The book was followed by another Sam Bourne title, The Last Testament (2007), set against the backdrop of the Middle East peace process. It draws on the author's experiences in that region as a reporter for over twenty years, and a Guardian newspaper sponsored dialogue which was influential in the 2003 Geneva Accords. The central character finds herself involved in a mix of the modern political situation and ancient revelations. The Final Reckoning (2008), was based on the true story of the Avengers: a group of Holocaust survivors who sought revenge against their Nazi persecutors, and just missed the peak of The Sunday Times best-seller list. Just before The Chosen One (2010), the fourth thriller by Sam Bourne was published in the UK, The Bookseller reported in April 2010 that HarperCollins had signed Freedland for three more Bourne books.[20]

HarperCollins published "Pantheon" in July 2012. Freedland's sixth novel entitled The 3rd Woman, published by HarperCollins in 2015 under his own name. His sixth Bourne novel, To Kill a President, was published by HarperCollins on 4 July 2017.[21] The seventh novel under the Sam Bourne pseudonym, To Kill the Truth, was published in February 2019,[22] and the eighth To Kill a Man, came out in March 2020.[23]

He is the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, a biography of Rudolf Vrba, who participated in the first escape by Jews from the Auschwitz concentration camp.[24] It reached number two in the Sunday Times bestsellers list and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize of 2022,[25] the Rathbones Folio Prize,[26] and the Waterstones Book of the Year.[27] In the US it won the National Jewish Book Award in both the Biography and Holocaust categories.[28]

Freedland is also the writer of a stage play Jews. In Their Own Words. performed at the Royal Court Theatre and directed by Vicky Featherstone in 2022.[29]

Views

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Israel, Zionism and antisemitism

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A leading liberal Zionist in the UK,[30] he wrote in 2012 that he uses the word Zionism infrequently, as the word has been misunderstood and has become defined as right-wing.[31] On the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, he believed that military action perpetuates conflict and called for negotiations to end the cycles of violence.[32] He defends Israel's right to exist,[33] but hopes that Israel will recognise the "high price" paid by Palestinians.[33]

While Jeremy Corbyn was its leader, Freedland accused the Labour Party in the UK of being in denial on the issue of antisemitism,[34][35] but Freedland approves of Keir Starmer's approach to the issue.[36] He has urged the left to treat Jews "the same way you'd treat any other minority".[33] He has also commented on the antisemitic expressions of Palestinians with whom Corbyn has associated and expressed the view that many of the Labour Party's new members were hostile to Jews.[37][38][39][40] Freedland's Labour antisemitism scoop has been criticised for demonising dissent.[41][dubious – discuss]

Beginning in 2021, Freedland has cohosted a Podcast called "Unholy: Two Jews on the News" with Israeli news anchor and journalist Yonit Levi.[42]

Jewish heritage

Freedland is a supporter of projects that seek to preserve Jewish identity and heritage. He has frequently written about the importance of both his faith and his cultural heritage.[43] He has also been active in campaigns to save British Jewish heritage.

Personal life

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Freedland is married to Sarah Peters, a radio and podcast producer. They have two sons, Jacob and Sam,[44] and conform to Masorti Judaism.[45] He is a governor of Simon Marks Jewish Primary School in Stamford Hill.[46]

Bibliography

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Books

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Non-fiction

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  • Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic (Fourth Estate, 1998) ISBN 978-0007291519
  • Jacob's Gift: A Journey into the Heart of Belonging (Hamish Hamilton, 2005), ISBN 978-0241142431
  • The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (John Murray, 2022) ISBN 978-1529369045

Fiction

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Articles

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  • "Trump's Chaver in Jerusalem" (review of Anshel Pfeffer, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, Basic Books, 2018), New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no 13 (16 August 2018), pp. 32–34. "As Pfeffer concludes, 'His [Netanyahu's] ultimate legacy will not be a more secure nation, but a deeply fractured Israeli society, living behind walls.'"
  • "A Feigned Reluctance" (review of Rory Stewart, How Not to Be a Politician, Penguin Press, 2024, 454 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXXI, no. 19 (5 December 2024), pp. 26–28. "Perhaps what galled [Rory] Stewart and his Tory allies most, just as it infuriated their Never Trump counterparts in the Republican Party, was the flight from truth. The embodiment of the malaise was Boris Johnson... [Stewart] might also have mentioned humor, which was a secret weapon for Johnson just as it remains for Trump. US readers are likely to think of Trump when Stewart reflects that Johnson was dangerous precisely because 'he alone could cloak a darker narrative in clowning.' Both men allowed and, in Trump's case, still allow 'the public to indulge ever more offensive opinions under the excuse that some of it might be a joke.'... The grief that runs through [Stewart's] book is not for his party only. It is for his country.... Britain's international influence is now at the margins, especially after the country's exit from the EU.... [Stewart] has contempt for the media's fixation on the trivial and the personal... Stewart discovered that, in contemporary politics, the liar who is brazen about his lies is seen as refreshingly honest, while the honest candidate who errs, but fails to brag about it, is the liar.... The reluctant, introspective, intellectual pol[itician] can flourish for a while; they can even capture the imagination, especially of those voters who pride themselves on not falling for anything so shallow as charisma. But they rarely win." (p. 28.)

References

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  1. ^ a b c "'FREEDLAND, Jonathan Saul', Who's Who 2012, A & C Black, 2012; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2011; online edn". Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  2. ^ "'Columnists quit Jewish Chronicle in Gaza articles row'". Retrieved 28 September 2024.
  3. ^ Kellaway, Kate (2 October 2022). "Jews. In Their Own Words. review – an illuminating, unsettling study of prejudice". The Observer. Retrieved 12 October 2022.
  4. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (18 May 2012). "In death – as in life – my mother was rescued by love". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 September 2023.
  5. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (3 May 2018). "A lifetime of life writing". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 3 May 2018.
  6. ^ "Conversations with friends about their lives: Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland". YouTube. 20 June 2020. Archived from the original on 22 December 2021.
  7. ^ "List of previous fellows". Laurence Stern Fellowship. City University. Archived from the original on 2 July 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  8. ^ Nanji, Noor (15 September 2024). "Columnists quit Jewish Chronicle in Gaza articles row". BBC News. Retrieved 15 September 2024.
  9. ^ "Awards 2008". The Guardian. London. 23 June 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  10. ^ Freedland, Jonathan. "Bush's Amazing Achievement". The New York Review of Books.
  11. ^ Williams, Martin (21 May 2014), "Two Guardian journalists win Orwell prize for journalism", The Guardian.
  12. ^ Katie Rosseinsky, Kate (21 May 2014), "Double win for Alan Johnson as This Boy receives the Orwell Prize", The Daily Telegraph.
  13. ^ "The Comment Awards 2015". Archived from the original on 29 January 2016. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
  14. ^ Jason Deans "Janine Gibson appointed editor-in-chief of theguardian.com", theguardian.com, 7 March 2014
  15. ^ "Are Blairites being purged from the Guardian?". The Spectator. 21 January 2016. Archived from the original on 10 June 2016. Retrieved 2 June 2016.
  16. ^ Gayle, Damien (8 November 2019). "General election: Nicola Sturgeon launches campaign for 'most important election in our lifetimes' – as it happened". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  17. ^ Sabin, Lamiat (8 November 2019). "The Guardian smears Labour councillor as anti-semite in case of mistaken identity". Morning Star. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  18. ^ Anthony Juluius "The bearers of memory", The Guardian, 19 February 2005
  19. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (14 September 2008). "How to be a good president". Documentary. BBC.
  20. ^ Page, Benedicte (16 April 2010). "Three Sam Bournes for HC". The Bookseller. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  21. ^ "To Kill the President: The most explosive thriller of the year | Harper Collins Australia". Harper Collins Australia. Retrieved 16 June 2017.
  22. ^ Bourne, Sam (22 January 2019). To Kill the Truth. Quercus. ISBN 9781787474925. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  23. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (12 March 2020). To Kill a Man. Quercus. ISBN 9781787474949. Retrieved 22 April 2024.
  24. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (9 June 2022). The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. John Murray. ISBN 978-1529369045. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  25. ^ "The Prize Announces its 2022 Shortlist".
  26. ^ "Jonathan Freedland up for global £30,000 literary award". 6 February 2023.
  27. ^ "Curtis Brown".
  28. ^ "72nd National Jewish Book Award Winners | Jewish Book Council". 18 January 2023.
  29. ^ "Jews. In Their Own Words". TheGuardian.com. 2 October 2022. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  30. ^ Lerman, Antony (22 August 2014), "The End of Liberal Zionism: Israel's Move to the Right Challenges Diaspora Jews", The New York Times.
  31. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (18 July 2012), "Yearning for the same land", New Statesman.
  32. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (26 July 2014). "Israel's fears are real, but this Gaza war is utterly self-defeating". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 October 2015.
  33. ^ a b c Freedland, Jonathan (29 April 2016). "My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you'd treat any other minority". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  34. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (17 September 2018). "Friends who are enemies". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  35. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (27 September 2017). "Labour's denial of antisemitism in its ranks leaves the party in a dark place". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  36. ^ The sacking of Long-Bailey shows that, at last, Labour is serious about antisemitism The Guardian
  37. ^ Freedland, Jonathan (18 March 2016). "Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  38. ^ Mance, Henry (1 June 2016). "Jeremy Corbyn warns of Brexit risk to workers' rights". Financial Times. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  39. ^ Doherty, Rosa (1 June 2016). "Corbyn takes aim at Jewish journalist in new documentary". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  40. ^ Rosenberg, Yair (3 June 2016). "Jeremy Corbyn Slams Jewish Journalist for Writing About Anti-semitism in Labour Party". The Tablet. Retrieved 25 March 2018.
  41. ^ "Anatomy Of A Propaganda Blitz". Times Series. 17 May 2016. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  42. ^ Krieger, Candice (31 May 2023). "A word in your ear about our favourite Jewish podcasts". www.jewishnews.co.uk. Retrieved 21 November 2023.
  43. ^ "A sense of belonging". Times Series. 24 February 2005. Retrieved 19 September 2021.
  44. ^ Kasriel, Alex (24 February 2005). "A sense of belonging". Newsquest Times series. Retrieved 13 October 2022.
  45. ^ Freedland, Michael (29 June 2019). "Freedland on Freedland". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 27 July 2019.
  46. ^ "Simon Marks School Governors List of Responsibilities" (PDF). Simon Marks Jewish Primary School. Retrieved 13 October 2022.
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