The Lines We Draw

A moving journey through a Jewish family history from BBC Newshour presenter Tim Franks.

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? 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 was a practising Jew with hardly any relations or sense of lineage. 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, Tim discovers ancestors who all speak to a part of the Jewish story: there are the refugees and the risk-takers; the artists, rabbis, soldiers and revolutionaries; there is even a route to the Conservative Party’s unlikeliest leader, Benjamin Disraeli.

This book is a deeply empathetic memoir which encourages us all to confront the lines we draw. In searching for what it is to be Jewish, Tim discovers what it means to take a stand and write about the world.

Tim Franks has presented Newshour, the flagship news and current affairs programme on the BBC World Service, since 2013. Before that, he spent almost 20 years as a reporter, nine of them as a foreign correspondent, covering several major conflicts. He cut his teeth reporting on the Troubles in Northern Ireland and became the Today programme’s special political correspondent.

Tim won one of the most prestigious international war-reporting awards - the Bayeux - for his coverage of war in Gaza.