By Elizabeth T. Rahaim
Photo by Schram
Amy Dockser Marcus photographed
in the New York office of
The Wall Street Journal,
April 4, 2005.
|
Atop Mount Nebo,
Amy Dockser Marcus P'83 absorbed the panoramic view of Jerusalem and got the title for her book. It was the late '90s, and Marcus was completing a seven-year stint as Middle East correspondent for
The Wall Street Journal- an assignment that had immersed her in coverage of the Oslo Accords and Israeli- Jordanian peace negotiations. Along the way, she became fascinated with political conflicts over biblical archaeological sites.
That fascination grew from two frontpage
WSJ stories on the subject and culminated in her book,
The View from Nebo: How Archaeology is Rewriting the Bible and Reshaping the Middle East (Little, Brown and Company, 2000). But that was just the beginning of Marcus's journalistic accomplishments.
Now a 15-year
WSJ veteran, Marcus is a staff reporter based in Boston and specializing in health-and the winner of a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for her series on cancer survivors. Nine stories in all, the series included three news articles related to cancer survival and six told through the eyes of an individual and his or her family, focusing on the different aspects of surviving cancer, before and after treatment.
Marcus joined the newspaper after graduating from Harvard University in 1987 with a degree in history and literature. In 1991, she asked to serve as the paper's Middle East correspondent and covered the political conflict following the Persian Gulf War from Tel Aviv.
"Growing up in a Jewish home encouraged me to be interested in Jewish issues in Israel," says Marcus. As a child, she visited Israel regularly with her family. Her parents, Bob and
Golda Carpenter Dockser P'58, BJEd'62, MJEd'73, MHL'78, a Hebrew College alumna and former College employee, sent Marcus to Prozdor to learn Hebrew, a skill that later eased her adult transition as a Middle East correspondent. Her Prozdor instructors were also influential; she thinks of them as the first ones to teach her "to make connections between what you're reading in language and history and current events."
Marcus remembers her experience living in the Middle East from 1991 to 1998 as an exciting time when "there was a sense that things needed to change." In addition to her coverage of the peace process, she wrote stories illustrating daily life; one of her favorites described a supermarket where women shopped and sat in a "fertility chair" that they believed was blessed and would ensure their pregnancy.
Immersed in the life of the region, Marcus became captivated by the politics of biblical archaeological sites. "The mix over history and current events intrigued me," she says, and the articles motivated her to embark on a journey to biblical archaeological sites throughout the Middle East. The exploration brought forth
The View from Nebo, its title inspired by one of her last reporting trips. "The climb to the top of Mount Nebo and the beautiful view of Jerusalem were very moving for me-looking into Israel allowed me time to reflect on the seven years I had spent in the region," she says.
Marcus shared her time in Israel with her husband, Ronen, whom she met and married in New York before they moved to Tel Aviv together. They both maintain strong ties to the country and return each year to visit family. Still covering the health beat-another subject that fascinates her- for the
Journal, Marcus is also finishing a new book that explores the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The mother of two children, Eden and Yuval, Marcus finds that her connection to Hebrew College remains close, too: "My summers at Camp Yavneh were really special-I made a lot of good friends there whom I still run into now. Their kids go to Schechter [Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston] with mine, and it's nice to be a part of that community again."
Extra! Extra!
Several other Hebrew College alumni have distinguished themselves in the field of print journalism. Among them:
Michelle Boorstein, a Prozdor student in the 1980s, has covered the central Virginia beat for
The Washington Post as a feature writer since fall 2002.
Some of her memorable community stories include a physician who, frustrated with the health insurance paradigm,
transformed his career by making house calls like an old-fashioned country doctor, and a woman from a Chesapeake Bay shack community who raised $10 million in grants to bring running water and new homes to her neighbors. Before joining the Post, Boorstein served The Associated Press for eight years as a reporter and editor based in Boston, Providence, Phoenix and New York City. She also worked for the a p 's foreign service from 1999 to 2002. During that time, she served as a foreign editor in New York and did temporary stints covering central/east Africa and the US military in Afghanistan.
Carey Goldberg P'77, a health/science reporter at
The Boston Globe since 2002, writes about a range of subjects, including neuroscience, human behavior, psychiatry, psychology and reproductive medicine.
Based in Moscow from 1989 to 1995 as a staffer for The Associated Press and then the
Los Angeles Times, she covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and dawning of the post-Soviet era and had occasional assignments in Israel. In 1995, she returned to the US and joined
The New York Times as a Metro reporter, became a national correspondent on the West Coast in 1996, then moved back to Boston as the
Times' Boston bureau chief in 1997. Goldberg spent 2001 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at m i t in preparation for full-time work as a science writer.
Michael Paulson P'82, The Boston Globe's religion reporter, was among a team of
Globe reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003- among numerous other prizes and awards-for their reporting on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
A member of the
Globe staff since 2000, Paulson has won the Wilbur Award from the Religion Communicators Council three consecutive years for writing about religion in the secular media. He also co-authored the book Betrayal:
The Crisis in the Catholic Church ( Little, Brown and Company, 2002), based on extensive coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Before joining the
Globe, he served the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer for seven years in a range of reporting positions and wrote for
The San Antonio Light and
The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass. A member of the board of the Brandeis University Gralla Fellows Program- an annual journalism program focusing on the American Jewish religion beat-he leads workshops there each summer.
Debbi Wilgoren P'83, a reporter for the Metropolitan desk of
The Washington Post for 15 years, has won several local journalism awards for articles about crime victims, education and community revitalization.
After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1989, she interned in Israel for the US Embassy in Tel Aviv and Reuters News Service in Jerusalem for six months before starting at the Post as an editorial assistant. Advancing to full-time reporter, Wilgoren has covered crime, education, economic development, religion and general news in Washington, D.C., the Virginia suburbs, and throughout the Washington metropolitan area. She has written series of articles about Washington, D.C., public schools and downtown and neighborhood redevelopment.
Jodi Wilgoren P'85 is the Chicago bureau chief of
The New York Times, leading coverage of 11 Midwestern states.
A former writer for the
Los Angeles Times, she has been a member of
The New York Times staff for seven years-first based in New York as national education correspondent before coming to Chicago in fall of 2001. She spent 18 months covering the 2004 presidential campaign, following first Howard Dean, then John Kerry. Other major stories she has covered include the murders of US District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's husband and mother this year and the Columbine school shootings in 2000. In addition to politics, she has reported on affirmative action, school choice, Arab-Americans and small-town issues. She is currently working on projects about the evolution debate.
-ETR
If we've missed you, please let us know! Send your notes to Sharlene Finkel at sfinkel@hebrewcollege.edu or update us online at hebrewcollege.edu/alumniupdates.
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