Talks to address reporting on Israel-Palestine and the state of journalism
Bernard Avishai, contributor to the New Yorker and adjunct professor of business at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, will speak at Yale on Thursday, Nov. 2 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
Avishai will give two talks during his campus visit. The first, a Grace Hopper College Tea, asks: “Has American Journalism Lost Its Civic Mission?” It will take place at 4 p.m. at 189 Elm Street. Avishai’s second talk, “Reporting on Israel-Palestine,” will take place at 7 p.m. at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street. Both events are free and open to the public.
Avishai writes chiefly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His essays have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the Harvard Business Review, among others.
After publishing his first book, the widely read “The Tragedy of Zionism” in 1985, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Avishai has also published two other books on Israel, among them 2008’s “The Hebrew Republic.”
After Avishai began his career as a journalist covering the Middle East, he earned a doctorate in political economy from the University of Toronto. He has also taught at Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dartmouth College. He was the director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.
From 1998 to 2001 Avishai was international director of Intellectual Capital at KPMG LLP. Before this he headed product development at Monitor Group, with which he is still associated. From 1986 to 1991 he was technology editor of Harvard Business Review.
Born in Montreal, Avishai volunteered on a farm in Israel during the Six-Day War, and five years later he and his wife moved there. Today, Avishai splits his time between Jerusalem and New Hampshire.
The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was established by Nelson Poynter, who received his master’s degree in 1927 from Yale. The fellowship brings to campus journalists from a wide variety of media outlets who have made significant contributions to their field. Among recent Poynter fellows are Scott Anderson, Susan Glasser, and Walter Robinson.
