I wrote this piece for the blog Madprogress.com about the problems with partisanship as an American Jew. While I conducted several interviews to add different perspectives, I largely guided the piece around my own experiences and my personal connection to Israel. View it here.
The first week of the spring semester of 2009, we had an influx of stories at University Communications and I stepped up to the challenge, completing three feature-length pieces on top of maneuvering my way through the first week of classes. I ended up with both front page stories in the Jan. 28 issue of Wisconsin Week.
I collaborated on the Piano Pioneers piece with Big Ten Network project manager, Peter Kleppin, who filmed my interviews and produced an online video collaboration with the written piece. Although I didn’t do any of the taping, The experience gave me great insight as to how to combine media and conduct a visually stimulating as well as mentally stimulating interview simultaneously. Watch it here. The Delta story also appeared online here.
This piece, which appeared both in “Wisconsin Week” and on the University’s Web site, particularly sticks out to me because of all the positive feedback I received from the campus Latino population. One woman, whose Latino husband had been a janitor employed by the university for years, e-mailed me to tell me how grateful she was that Latino students and professors in higher education were recognized in the article, and hopes that positive coverage such as this will lead to a changing perception of the Latino population nation-wide. E-mails such as these remind me of why I wanted to become a journalist in the first place. View the piece here.
Here is one of the dozens of humor columns I wrote every week for the duration of both my junior and senior years.
Election night
I worked on the video coverage of the 2008 election night when Obama claimed victory with journalism school peers Heather Gjerde and Aaron Brenner. For more than six hours, the three of us lagged our equipment from party to party hoping to capture the most enthusiastic crowd in the best lighting. We took turns filming, lighting and gathering the crowd for individual interviews on this historic evening. It was one of the most exhausting and exhilarating nights of my life.
Bridging the Muslim-Jewish Divide
I covered the exhibit “Families of Abraham” when it appeared in Madison in November of 2008 for the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. In addition to adding a local lede to the JTA piece, I conducted a video interview with a university student and a rabbi which appeared on the Chronicle’s Web site alongside the story. See it here.
I wrote this article for University Communications. It appeared both on the UW-Madison Web site and in UC’s bi-weekly publication, “Wisconsin Week.” I chose to display this piece because I challenged myself to not only tell the story of the two ambitious young graduates I interviewed, but capture their vivacious energy on the page. View it here.
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