I was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, and it was there that I first learned to code HTML in a year-long course in the 8th grade. It would stay only a hobby up until my time at the graduate school of Journalism at UC Berkeley where I focused on multimedia production and realized how much I enjoyed that work. 

As a kid I dreamed of being a sports journalist ever since watching Israel’s first Olympic medal – a silver one – when I was 10 years old. I wrote for school and local neighborhoods before getting a chance at 14-years-old to write content for the website of my favorite local professional basketball team. Fast-forward five years, and I was hired by Ha’aretz – a daily national newspaper – to cover the same team. I did that for five years and during this period I got to travel to Belgium to cover the team’s appearance in a European cup final. I also covered a local pro soccer team in Jerusalem, and covered a variety of other sports for both Hebrew and English of the paper. During that time period I also worked for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority, producing sports and news for the English and Arabic departments.

The highlight of my time at Ha’aretz was covering the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens (both as a writer and photographer) and especially the first Israeli Olympic gold medal. I followed it up two years later, covering the 2006 Winter Olympics for the Jerusalem Post.

After moving to the US for graduate school, I continued with freelance writing for Israeli publications and covered college football and basketball, NBA games, and the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco. I even traveled to Greece to write about the Greek basketball playoffs that year, too.