On Monday, April 5, the Institute hosted a panel conversation along with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
The pandemic raised tensions between ultra-Orthodox communities and governments in both the United States and Israel. A new breed of ultra-Orthodox journalists has covered the crisis, and faced the challenge of reporting with both independence and attachment to a media-shy society. Their experience has wider implications for minority journalists. Please watch the video below with moderator Jane Eisner and journalists Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, Tali Farkash, and Jacob Kornbluh.
Jane Eisner is an accomplished journalist, educator, non-profit leader and public speaker who is currently director of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, overseeing the Masters of Arts program. For more than a decade, she was the Forward’s editor-in-chief, the first woman to hold the position at America’s foremost national Jewish news organization. Eisner is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia Journalism School. She was a fellow of the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center at Bryn Mawr College in its inaugural year and participated in the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program in 2009. She lives in New York City with her husband, Dr. Mark Berger.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt is a writer living in New York City. She was previously the Life editor at the Forward, and a reporter for Haaretz. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vox, and Salon, among others. She does pastoral work alongside her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt in Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Tali Farkash is a haredi journalist writing for the Israeli news site Ynet, a feminist activist, and a doctoral student in gender studies at Bar Ilan University. She was previously a senior writer for the haredi magazine “Bakehila” and a news editor for the “Kol Chay” radio station.
Jacob Kornbluh is the senior political reporter for the Forward. Kornbluh covers politics with a Jewish angle and regularly interviews government officials, political commentators and security experts on issues that matter to the broader Jewish community. He was featured in JTA’s 2018 list of top 50 Jews to follow on Twitter. He previously worked as a national politics reporter for Jewish Insider, City Hall reporter for JP Updates and and covered the 2013 NYC mayoral race for the Yeshiva World News.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye Family and Knapp Family Foundation.