Jerusalem Faculty

Linda Gradstein (International Reporting) is the Middle East bureau chief for The Media Line, one of the largest purveyors of media content to the Arab World. For 20 years, she was the Jerusalem correspondent for National Public Radio and has won several awards for her coverage. She has covered important events in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip such as the intifada, the mass immigration of Soviet immigrants to Israel, the leadership of Yasser Arafat, Hamas in Gaza, the Persian Gulf war, and major elections in Israel. Ms. Gradstein was the Israel correspondent for NPR News from 1990 until 2009. She is a member of the team that received the Overseas Press Club award for her coverage of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the team that received Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for her coverage of the Persian Gulf War. She has also published stories in The Washington Post, Slate, and The Jerusalem Report. She has been a visiting professor of journalism at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and at the College of Charleston, in Charleston, South Carolina. Linda speaks Hebrew and Arabic. Her most important productions are her four children, age 8–18.

Rachele Kanigel (Program Director, International Reporting) is an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. Before becoming a professor she was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years and worked at The Oakland Tribune and The News and Observer in Raleigh, NC. She continues to freelance for magazine and websites; her work has appeared in TIME, U.S. News & World Report, Health, Yoga Journal, Prevention, CNN.com, MSNBC.com and other magazines and websites. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of The Student Newspaper Survival Guide. She has directed ieiMedia programs in Urbino, Italy (2009) and Perpignan, France (2010-2011) and taught in ieiMedia’s Cagli program in 2007.

Eran Kaplan (Modern Israel) is the Rhoda and Richard Goldman Chair in Israel Studies at SFSU. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude) from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University. Before coming to San Francisco, he taught at Princeton, Cincinnati and Toronto. He is the author of The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and its Ideological Legacy and of The Origins Of Israel: A Documentary History with Derek Penslar (both published by the University of Wisconsin Press). In addition to his scholarly publications, he has contributed articles to Haaretz and Tikkun.

Ilene Prusher (International Reporting) is a multi-genre writer based in Jerusalem, who has covered some 30 countries in the course of her career as a foreign correspondent. She was a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor from 2000 to 2010, serving as the Boston-based newspaper’s bureau chief in Tokyo, Istanbul, and Jerusalem and covering the major conflicts of the past decade: Iraq and Afghanistan. She now teaches Reporting Conflict for NYU-Tel Aviv, runs creative writing workshops, writes for Haaretz and writes Primigravida, a popular blog about motherhood. After graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1993, she started her career as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Later, she freelanced from the Middle East for Newsday, The New Republic, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Observer (UK). She was nominated by The Christian Science Monitor for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for ”What’s a Kidney Worth,” an investigative story on organ trafficking, and won the United Nations Correspondents’ Association (UNCA) Award in 1998 for several stories on Somalia. Her first novel, Baghdad Fixer, was released in November 2012 by Halban Publishers in London.