August 16, 2012
Naomi Zeveloff, M.A. ’11 published her master’s thesis about Ramallah with Guernica magazine this week, in a feature titled “The Five-Star Occupation.”
In the piece, Zeveloff looks into the Palestinian city’s recent economic boom, profiling inhabitants and the city itself—how it stands today, and the historical and political conditions that shaped it.
“What is different about today’s rush of economic activity—which began around 2008 and has intensified since, and which I witnessed first hand when I visited a year and a half ago—is that it is occurring independently of any political agreement with Israel for Palestinian independence. Ramallah is a cosmopolitan city, in an entity without borders or currency, a burgeoning metropolis adrift in the murkiest of political waters,” she writes.
A longer version of Zeveloff’s piece won best thesis prize for M.A. candidates when she graduated, with an M.A. concentration in politics, from the Journalism School in 2011. She is now deputy culture editor at The Forward, and her work has appeared in alternative newsweeklies in Colorado Springs, Denver, Dallas and Salt Lake City and on Salon.com. She has received an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for immigration reporting, and three Colorado Society of Professional Journalists awards for excellence in reporting.
In October, Zeveloff wrote a piece about Jewish farm settlement Clarion for The Forward that was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish, and published in Ha’aretz and the Yiddish Forward respectively.
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