A World of Possibilities - Tim Franks

Our guest

Tim Franks has presented Newshour, the flagship news programme on the BBC World Service, since 2013. Before that he spent almost twenty years as a reporter: the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Westminster and the Today programme, then nine years as a foreign correspondent in Washington, Brussels and Jerusalem. He won the Bayeux award for war correspondents for his reporting from Gaza. His book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew and an Argument About Identity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. He was raised in Birmingham, and now lives in London.

Key topics

• Being a Jew and a journalist, 
• The Sephardi roads: from Constantinople to Amsterdam,
• Reform, status, and who is allowed to say what is authentically Jewish

Your guide

Short definitions for terms in this episode.

• Hazzan: cantor, the person who leads prayer in song
• Hakham: Sephardi title for a rabbi or communal religious leader
• Cheder: Jewish school for children
• Leyning: chanting portions from the Torah aloud in synagogue
• Bevis Marks: London's Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest in continuous use in Britain

Want to learn more?

The following episodes also explore the questions of ‘belonging’ in private / public:

• S2E3, “Being Seen Matters” - Yaffa Judah 
• S1E9, British Black Jews - Kenneth Awele Okafor
• S3E2, Plural and Partial - Linda Dangoor

References and resources

• The Lines We Draw, Tim Franks, Bloomsbury 2025
• Tim Franks interviewed about the book, J. The Jewish News of Northern California
• Tim's 2010 BBC ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ special piece 
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), on double consciousness

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Show credits

Host / Producer: Eylan Ezekiel

Post-production: Communicating for Impact

Artwork: Emily Theodore

Music: Aleksafor utransndr Karabanov

Sound effects: Serge Quadrado

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