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, 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. But one day, 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, Tim 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, Benjamin Disraeli.

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, Tim discovers what it means to take a stand and write about the world.

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