The National Portrait Gallery is celebrating the life and work of the late Lucian Freud by holding a major retrospective of his drawings and paintings, which opened yesterday. Lucian died last summer, aged 88.

In some respects, Sam Frears is very fortunate. Sam - the son of film director Stephen Frears - is popular, has a wide circle of friends, including the writer Alan Bennett, is bright, ambitious, has a sharp sense of humour and no money worries.

'I feel I have done a public service in portraying my horror of the Jewish burial grounds that ring the M25," says artist Corinne Pearlman. She is talking about of her comic, Losing the Plot, which, over two delicately drawn pages, highlights the jarring proximity of several Jewish cemeteries to one of Europe's busiest motorways.

This may have been a food programme but you do not have to be long in Jerusalem before you taste the flavour of politics.

Falafel is, of course, the national dish of Israel - unless you happen to be a Palestinian vendor of the ubiquitous chickpea balls who feels he has a greater claim to the dish than Israeli upstarts.

About halfway through last night's second episode of Simon Sebag-Montefiore's frantic journey through the history of Jerusalem, I began to feel both dizzy and nauseous.

Sebag-Montefiore - author of a best-selling history of the holy city - had argued that its bloody history was "the best argument against religion ever invented". But that was not what caused my momentary discomfort.

The Last Jews of Iraq
Radio 4, ★★★★✩

On The Road With An Orthodox Rabbi
BBC News Channel, ★★★✩✩

Josef Herman is probably best known for his paintings of Welsh miners, a subject he first painted when he visited the Welsh mining town of Ystradgynlais in 1944.

Simon and Garfunkel may have started, in the words of Alan Yentob, as two Jewish nebbishes from New York but by 1970 they were on top of their game.

Fictional Jewish detectives are a rare breed.

Jamie Oliver divides people into two camps - those who find him admirable and inspiring, if a bit irritating, and those who find him just irritating.

'It's like an emotional roller-coaster. You're going to be scared, you're going to laugh and sometimes it's going to be dramatic," enthuses Israeli film director Navot Papushado, talking about the experience of watching a horror film.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is back for its eighth series. As usual, devotees live from one episode to the next while the rest of the country completely fails to get it.

So what is so funny about an outspoken, sex-obsessed, obnoxious bald guy who swears a lot?

Judy Chicago might be forgiven for feeling frustrated.

There is nothing more gripping than a good courtroom drama. But how about a courtroom drama where the star witness is Adolf Hitler and the man cross-examining him is a Jewish lawyer?

Mark Hayhurst's intelligent film portrayed Hans Litten, the lawyer who in 1930 really did interrogate Hitler in a Berlin court, as a brave and audacious man.

'The terrible thing about digital cameras is that they make everyone think they're a photographer," says Ross Halfin almost as soon as we have sat down in a dark corner his favourite Japanese restaurant in Soho. "It's the same as someone having a laptop and assuming that they are a writer. It's a ridiculous idea, isn't it?

Ernst Haas was a maverick. He used his camera almost as an antidote to the hardships he had suffered in Nazi Vienna. With only sporadic training, he turned to photography after being kicked out of medical school for being Jewish, forced into hard labour and seeing his father die, heartbroken, at being stripped of his position in the Austrian government.

The cuts are biting hard at the BBC, and the resulting industrial action has hit news programmes this week.