Background

Jonathan Saul Freedland was born on February 25, 1967, in the United Kingdom. He is the son of Michael Freedland, a biographer and journalist, and Sara Hocherman.

Education

Freedland was educated at University College School, in Hampstead, London. Later, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at Wadham College, Oxford.

Career

Jonathan Freedland is the author of nine books, two of them non-fiction under his own name. The first, Bring Home the Revolution, was written when Freedland returned after serving for four years as the Guardian’s Washington Correspondent. He was shocked to find abuses of government power and infringement of individual liberty there - such as police engaging in search and seizure without reason or warrant, juries convicting people who refuse to testify against themselves, assuming that silence equals guilt and even the prospect of trial by jury being abolished in complex cases because some members of Parliament believed that ordinary people were not intelligent enough to understand the testimony. The book argued that Britain was in dire need of a constitutional and cultural overhaul, one that could learn much from America. The book was later adapted into a TV series for BBC Two. In 2005, he published Jacob’s Gift, a memoir telling the stories of three generations of his own family, as well as exploring wider questions of identity and belonging.

Since 2006 he has published seven best-selling novels under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. The first is The Righteous Men. That was followed by The Last Testament (2007), The Final Reckoning (2008), The Chosen One (2010) and Pantheon (2012), The 3rd Woman (2015), To Kill the President (2017) and To Kill the Truth (2019).

Earlier in his career, Freedland worked as a reporter for The Washington Post, for BBC News – chiefly for Radio 4’s Today and World at One programme but also for Radio 1’s Newsbeat – and for the Sunday Correspondent newspaper. In 1998 he was the presenter of the short-lived Channel 4 series, Zeitgeist. Nowadays he writes a weekly column for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View.

Achievements

• Sam Bourne is an award-winning British journalist and broadcaster. He has written a weekly column for The Guardian since 1997, having previously served as the paper's Washington correspondent. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The New Republic, and The Jewish Chronicle, and he presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary-history series The Long View. In 2008, he was awarded the David Watt Prize for Journalism, having been named ‘Columnist of the Year’ in the What the Papers Say awards for 2002, where the judges praised him for his “incisive, original, strong and very outspoken views”.
  
  For nearly two decades, he has covered the Middle East conflict, and in 2002, he chaired a three-day dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, which was sponsored by The Guardian. The participants in that meeting went on to broker the 2003 Geneva Accord.
  
  Freedland is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Righteous Men, also a number-one bestseller in the UK, which has been translated into thirty-one languages.

Works

More photos

• audiobook

  • The Chosen One

    (In the game of Washington politics, the stakes are as hig...)

    2010

• book

  • The Final Reckoning

    (When a man’s death at the United Nations turns out to be ...)

    2008
  • The Last Testament

    (Set against the backdrop of the world’s most bitter inter...)

    2007
  • The Plot Against the President

    (The United States has elected a volatile demagogue as pre...)

    2018
  • To Kill the Truth

    (Someone is trying to destroy the evidence of history's gr...)

    2019
  • The 3rd Woman

    (Journalist Madison Webb is obsessed with exposing lies an...)

    2015
  • The Righteous Men

    (A teenage computer prodigy is mortally strangled in Mumba...)

    2006
  • To Kill the President 2017
  • Jacob's Gift: A Journey into the Heart of Belonging 2005
  • Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic 2008
  • Intervention 2015
  • Pantheon 2012

Religion

Jonathan Freedland conforms to Conservative Judaism.

Views

Freedland’s love for America is a tough sell in Britain, where contempt for Americans may be the only politically correct hatred left in Britain. American fast food and puerile action movies are used to justify this contempt, but as Freedland says, the best of America is not understood or appreciated in Britain - and it is the Britons’ loss.

Freedland believes that Britons should look past the fast food and popular culture to what America really has to offer: political enlightenment. He contends that Britain is no longer a true democracy, but what Scardino calls “a dictatorship of parliament.”

Freedland believes that what Britain needs is more government - more elected officials, and more representatives who are responsible to the people, not the appointed, unelected officials currently in power. Freedland also believes that the monarchy must be abolished since it is the basis of the class system prevalent in Britain.

Because Britain does not have an equivalent of the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech in the United States, Freedland argues that true freedom does not exist there. In Britain, government documents belong to the crown and are often kept a secret, merely for the convenience of those in power.

Quotations: “The British state much prefers darkness to light. So the British government is uncomfortable with unregulated expression by its citizens."

Connections

Freedland is married to Sarah Peters and has two daughters.

Father:

Michael Freedland

Mother:

Sara Hocherman

Wife:

Sarah Peters