Join the B’nai Torah Congregation Melton Alumni Association for our Annual Speaker Brunch:
How do we know what we know?
with Ilene Prusher
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Director of Graduate Studies in Journalism, University of Miami

(This event is exclusively for Melton Alumni Association members.)
To become a Melton Alumni Association member, click here.

Brunch is sponsored by Jo Robbins & Dorothy Wizer

The state of journalism is deeply worrying, with newspaper circulation declining, news deserts spreading, and hyper-partisan media seeming to fuel an even more divided electorate. Yet there are some really encouraging signs about the ways in which citizen journalism and mobile news-gathering tools are shaping the national conversation. Veteran journalist Ilene Prusher gives us an inside look into both the most concerning trends in journalism, as well as the most positive ones – and provides some food for thought on how journalism is aligned with Jewish values.

Ilene Prusher is the Director of the M.A. program in Journalism at the University of Miami and Assistant Professor of Practice. Prusher also spearheads news-academic partnerships in the School of Communication, including CommunityWire.Miami. Before coming to the University of Miami, Prusher spent 10 years teaching journalism at Florida Atlantic University, where she was the founder and digital director of MediaLab@FAU. This news-academic partnership has led to dozens of journalism students having their work published by new partners across Florida. Under Prusher’s leadership, MediaLab won a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a nationwide philanthropic initiative to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news.

Prusher is an award-winning journalist and author who spent two decades abroad as a foreign correspondent before embarking on her career as a journalism educator. After completing her first master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she chose to focus on international affairs, specifically the Middle East and Asia. As a foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor from 1996-2010, she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Prusher served as Monitor’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, Istanbul and Tokyo. She was Jerusalem correspondent for TIME, a columnist and feature writer for Haaretz, and a podcast host on TLV1 Radio. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ms., CNN, NBC NewsThink, FiveThirtyEight, The Forward and Moment. She has served as a guest commentator on international affairs on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN and Fox News.

For more information, please contact Penina Bredoff, Adult Education & Melton Director, at 561-392-8566 or email melton@bnai-torah.org.