The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew and an Argument about Identity

'What makes this brilliant, considered book worthwhile is not its breadth but how thoughtful it is.'
Financial Times

'The book is stunning. He is an extraordinary writer. Such erudition. Wisdom. Humanity. And humour. '
Fergal Keane, BBC News

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.

Tim Franks has presented Newshour, the flagship news and current affairs programme on the BBC World Service since 2013. Before that, Tim spent almost 20 years as a reporter. He cut his teeth covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland before heading to Westminster and becoming the Today programme's special political correspondent.

Tim spent nine years as a foreign correspondent, based in Washington, Brussels and Jerusalem, and travelling across Europe and the Middle East. He's covered several major conflicts, from Iraq and Israel–Lebanon, to South Sudan and Ukraine. Tim won one of the most prestigious international war-reporting awards – the Bayeux – for his coverage of war in Gaza. He also spent two years as the BBC's most improbable sports correspondent.

Although he's now based in London, with Newshour, Tim does still regularly report from the field, and has co-presented the programme from locations as diverse as Managua, Beijing, Addis Ababa, Caracas, Damascus, Berlin and Bujumbura.