Jonathan Saul Freedland (born 25 February 1967) is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Early life The youngest of three children and the only son of a Jewish couple, biographer and journalist Michael Freedland, and Israeli-born Sara Hocherman, he was educated at University College School, a boys' independent school in Hampstead, London. As a child, Freedland periodically accompanied his father for broadcasting work. On one occasion, his father was interviewing Eric Morecambe, who comically assumed the 10 year-old Freedland was married. After a gap year working on a kibbutz in Israel with the Labour Zionist Habonim Dror (where Freedland had been a mentor to Sacha Baron Cohen), he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Wadham College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he was editor of Cherwell, the student newspaper. Journalism Freedland began his Fleet Street career at the short-lived Sunday Correspondent. In 1990 he joined the BBC as a news reporter across radio and television, including for The World at One and Today on Radio 4. In 1992, he was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship on The Washington Post, serving as a staff writer on national news. He was Washington Correspondent for The Guardian from 1993 until 1997, when he returned to London as an editorial writer and columnist. Between 2002 and 2004, Freedland was an occasional columnist for the Daily Mirror and from 2005 to 2007 he wrote a weekly column for the London Evening Standard. He writes a monthly column for The Jewish Chronicle. He has also been published in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek and The New Republic. Freedland was named 'Columnist of the Year' in the 2002 What the Papers Say awards and in 2008 was awarded the David Watt Prize for Journalism, in recognition of his essay "Bush's Amazing Achievement", published in The New York Review of Books. Nominated on seven occasions, Freedland was awarded a special Orwell Prize in May 2014 for his journalism. In 2016, he won the "Commentariat of the Year" prize at the Comment Awards. Freedland was executive editor of the opinion section of The Guardian from May 2014 till