When I was looking for 10 reporters to become this semester’s New Voices National Correspondents, the field was full of Cohens, Fines and Silvers; among seven others, we hired Zach C. Cohen, Dafna Fine and Carly Silver. But there was also this Chen in the mix, one Jun Chen.
Jun is a graduate student at Indiana University. Her first piece for New Voices, “Healing 9/11 Wounds Through Dialogue,” appears online today.
Kaifeng aside, it is indeed safe to assume that she’s not a Member of the Tribe. Jun is, however, a terrific journalist and a keen observer of the Jews. When she applied for the position, she sent me two clips: One was an article about a panel on antisemitism at I.U. and the other was about the reactions of Jewish and Israeli students to the Arab Spring.
Jun, as it turns out, is also a capable photographer. At my college paper, we always joked about the impossibility of getting interesting photos at lectures, not to mention panel discussions. It’s not such a hard thing to do, yet our photographers always seemed to fall just short
Yet, for today’s piece, Jun turned out the photo to the right. A different photo, also by her, can be seen with the article, but I liked this one enough to post it as well.
Jun, welcome to New Voices–and Shabbat Shalom.
