After last July’s mega event, Jews Talk Cricket returns two nights before the Lord’s Test to regale us with Jewish cricketing stories.
The panel will include:
- Times columnist, restaurant critic and cricket lover Giles Coren;
- Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland;
- Andy Zaltzman, presenter of The News Quiz and Test Match Special statistician; and
- Daniel Lightman, co-curator of the current (and first ever) exhibition at the MCC Museum on Jews and Cricket.
Giles Coren is a columnist, restaurant critic, television and radio presenter, and wily left-arm spinner in the Hedley Verity/Bishan Bedi tradition - although it was Botham's Ashes in 1981 that changed his life forever. For his work in The Times he has won both Food and Drink Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards and Restaurant Writer of the Year at the Fortnum and Mason Awards. His 2005 novel, Winkler, about cricket and the Holocaust, did not do as well as his 1997 biography of the vacuum cleaner tycoon James Dyson, and that still makes him sad.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View, as well as two podcasts, Politics Weekly America for the Guardian and Unholy: Two Jews on the News, alongside the Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. Awarded an Orwell Prize for journalism, he has written 12 books, the latest being The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. He made his Test debut in 1978 - not playing, but taking the Northern Line from Edgware to The Oval to see England play against New Zealand - and never looked back.
Andy Zaltzman has been the presenter of The News Quiz since 2020 and a Test Match Special statistician since 2016. He has co-hosted the weekly satirical comedy podcast The Bugle since 2007. Andy’s love of cricket evolved whilst spending hours and hours alone in front of the television as a child of the 1980s, watching England lose to every known cricketing opposition in the universe but nonetheless being entranced by the other-worldly magnificence of David Gower, the heroic obduracy of Chris Tavaré, and the almost surrealist scattergunnery of the England selectors. His lifelong fascination with cricket’s numbers was aided by his deep mediocrity as a player.
Daniel Lightman is a King’s Counsel at Serle Court Chambers. He has co-curated the current (and first ever) exhibition at the MCC Museum on Jews and Cricket, and his articles in Wisden, The Cricketer and Nightwatchman have revealed hitherto unknown stories of the lives of Jewish (and supposedly Jewish) cricketers, including Norman Gordon, Sid O’Linn and Percy Fender. He and Zaki Cooper have co-authored articles on subjects ranging from cricket and the Royal family to cricketing clergymen. Wisden described their Cricket Grounds from the Air as “This year’s most visually arresting book… It is a fabulous book. No coffee table should be without it.”