Slain Journalist Steven Sotloff Gets Danny Pearl Award

By JTA February 8, 2015

Slain conflict journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were posthumously honored with an award in memory of murdered Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl.

The ADL Daniel Pearl Award was presented to the parents of Foley and Sotloff Friday during the organization’s 2015 National Executive Committee Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.

Pearl was a Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and killed in Pakistan in February 2002 while pursuing a story about international terrorism.

Foley was killed in Syria in August 2014 by the terrorist group ISIS after being held hostage for nearly two years. He was captured while reporting in Syria, near the Turkish border. He had worked in northern Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

A native of Pinecrest, Fla., Sotloff’s career in journalism took off during the Arab Spring when he worked for media outlets such as Time magazine, the Jerusalem Post, The National Interest, Media Line, World Affairs and Foreign Policy. After he was kidnapped by ISIS on August 4, 2013 while working in Syria, Sotloff’s friends and family made efforts to remove references on the Internet to the fact he was Jewish, had studied in Israel and held dual U.S.-Israel citizenship.

“In many ways, James and Steven followed in Danny’s footsteps. It was their thirst for knowledge, their quest for answers, their interest in understanding more deeply that impelled them into journalism,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director, said in presenting the awards. “They were not necessarily in search of the ‘big story’ that could make headlines and advance their careers. They were more interested in the people behind the stories, in finding the humanity behind the headlines.”

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