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.
I always loved languages, music and any combination of the two. A big fan of the Greek language, I not only taught myself the language, but have been following Greek music for many years and even hosted a weekly segment in an Israeli radio show about it, where I shared music news and releases from Greece, and traveled to Greece quite a few times over the years. I sometimes found ways to use my love and knowledge of music in my work too, and when I worked for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority I often helped the promotional department with finding music for their ads.
I’ve been an avid Eurovision (the European song contest) fan since I was very young, and when I still worked as a journalist I was lucky enough to attend and cover it twice, in Ukraine and Turkey. In the last decade I’ve been running a Eurovision website (which I built) with friends from Germany and the United Kingdom where I’ve been blogging about the competition every year. I even got to represent our website and cover the competition for it in person in 2019, when the contest was hosted in Tel Aviv.
As a lover of languages it might not be a great surprise that I’ve always loved to read and even taught myself to read as a kid. As an adult, I’m very active in local and online book communities, and regularly share reviews and recommendations as well as participate in book discussions on Bookstagram, the book lover community on Instagram. On top of making friends and sharing my passion with others it gave me an opportunity to interact with authors, which in some cases led to being a beta reader for authors’ upcoming novels. It was such a great honor and really satisfying to see my notes and suggestions being used in print!
It also has been a surprising and wonderful creative outlet for me, and I always enjoy coming up with colorful ways to present books I loved and books I intend to read. I’ve been posting photos for several years now, and here are some of my recently taken and shared favorite photos that I really enjoyed setting up.