A Young Reporter Finds His Calling
The Indy just welcomed me in with open arms and recognized that I could contribute to a journalistic enterprise that was serious and rigorously edited, and was not wedded to the sectarian politics of the left.
In the mid-2000s, I was a left-wing high school student growing up in the suburbs outside New York City. I was heavily influenced by folk punk music which took me to New York City and the Lower East Side to see a lot of shows. I got involved with the local Food Not Bombs chapter, and went to Tompkins Square Park to serve food. At the ABC No Rio event space, there were always copies of The Indypendent there. I remember being impressed with the paper.
Once I moved to the city to attend college, I started volunteering with The Indy. At first, I just came to meetings and then I started taking shifts handing out papers in the subway at rush hour. I came more for the exposure to left-wing activism than out of ambition to be a journalist. But, I eventually began covering stories: a profile of a group that put out a weekly online calendar of protests across the city; protests for affordable housing led by homeless people, a venerable antiwar organization debating whether to reap millions of dollars from the sale of a prized piece of real estate. My first stories weren’t very well written as I recall, but they were well edited.
The Indy just welcomed me in with open arms and recognized that I could contribute to a journalistic enterprise that was serious and rigorously edited, and was not wedded to the sectarian politics of the left. It was about covering the world as it is – both the shitty parts but also recognizing the good people in this city and nationwide that are trying to do something better.
A signal moment for me was when Israel invaded Gaza in December 2008 in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. It was called Operation Cast Lead and I remember being taken aback by it. I was raised secular Jewish in a household that was pro-union but not very political. Zionism was in the background, but it was never a part of my daily life.
The following year, when there was the call for internationals to participate in a Gaza Freedom March. I decided to go. Some Indy people chipped in to my fund, and I made it to Egypt and then on to Gaza. I wrote about it for The Indypendent and I began to write for other outlets as well, MondoWeiss in particular, about what I was seeing.
I continued covering issues related to Israel-Palestine and how that conflict impacts the United States as a freelancer for a variety of left publications over the years. Today, I am a senior reporter at Jewish Currents which I think does a very good job of covering issues of interest to the Jewish Left. The basic principles that The Indy taught me of being curious and principled and using mainstream journalistic convention while challenging the mainstream frame of how to discuss and think about politics is an ethos I have built on throughout my freelance career and now my career at Jewish Currents.
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The impact we made by distributing our post-9/11 special issues at Union Square, where ordinary people were asking extraordinary questions, is what truly ignited the passion for independent reporting that still shines in The Indypendent today.
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