We are living in a media environment where lies travel faster than corrections, where images are weaponized before facts are known, where the frame of a story, often set in a newsroom thousands of miles away, can endanger Jewish lives within hours.
The casual slanders, the subtle omissions, the reflexive framing of Israel as aggressor and Jews as suspect – these are not rare mistakes. They are patterns. And patterns, left unchallenged, become the record of history.
There comes a moment when waiting becomes an abdication. When “someone should” turns into “I must.” When you realize that the future of the Jewish story – our truth, our place in history – will be written with or without us, and that if we remain on the sidelines, others will write it for us.
That moment is now.
The machinery of news
As a journalist trained at Columbia University and sharpened in the field, I have lived inside the machinery of news. I know its power to illuminate and its equal power to distort. I have watched how a single word choice can tilt the moral axis of a story, how a poorly informed editor can decide which facts matter and which are buried, how “balance” can be a fig leaf for bias.
And I have watched, too often, as the Jewish perspective is treated not as an integral part of the story but as an afterthought, if it appears at all.
This is not a problem that can be solved by issuing press releases or posting rebuttals on social media. By the time we are reacting, the story has already hardened.
That is why I founded the Karsh Journalism Fellowship in partnership with Jewish Federation Los Angeles.
The fellowship is not about creating spokespeople. It is about producing world-class journalists who can compete at the highest levels of the profession. Reporters, editors, and producers who understand the craft, who can break stories, shape coverage, and earn the respect of their peers not because of their identity but because of their excellence. Those who carry, within that excellence, an unshakable understanding of Jewish history and the stakes of the moment in which we are living.
Over the course of three retreats in three cities, New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, our fellows will work with leading journalists, editors, and media thinkers. They will learn to detect bias, ask tough questions in sometimes hostile environments, and sharpen their ability to tell stories that are accurate and compelling.
They will meet policymakers, analysts, and historians to deepen their subject knowledge, and they will leave with not just a skillset but a network – a community that will sustain them long after the fellowship ends.
We chose this structure for a reason. The problem we are confronting is systemic, so our answer must be systemic. This is not a one-off seminar or a burst of advocacy during a crisis. It is the deliberate building of an intellectual and professional infrastructure that will last decades.
Inflection point
Why now? Because we are at an inflection point.
October 7 was not just a terrorist attack. It was a rupture: in Jewish security, in global perception, and in the media’s treatment of our story.
In the days that followed, as Jews were still identifying their dead and searching for their kidnapped, much of the press moved reflexively to moral equivalence. At times, they dispensed with even that pretense. The erasure of our pain was swift, and for many of us, shattering.
I will not pretend that a single fellowship can undo the forces that produced that coverage. But I also refuse to believe that our only choice is to watch it happen again. We cannot control the entire conversation, but we can train people who will be in the room where it is shaped.
That is the urgency. The media will not wait for us to catch up. And every day that passes without a new generation of Jewish journalists in the field is another day that the record of our time is written without us.
I care about this not only as a journalist, but as a mother, a Jew, and an American.
I want my children to inherit a world where their story is told with accuracy and dignity. I want them to see Jewish journalists covering every beat – not just “Jewish stories,” but politics, culture, science, foreign affairs – bringing the same rigor to their craft that any great reporter should, but with the lived awareness that our people’s survival has always depended, in part, on the story told about us.
It is time to build that future. Time to stop outsourcing the telling of our story. Time to invest in the people who will, quite literally, write the first draft of Jewish history.
We can be written about, or we can write. I choose the latter, and I know there are many young journalists inspired to do the same.
The writer is a six-time Emmy-nominated multimedia journalist, covering Los Angeles County for LA36’s LA County Channel. She reports on social and humanitarian issues impacting Angelenos.