The Forward hires Pulitzer winner to report from Israel
‘Maybe all that any of us can do is ask better questions of more people and listen more carefully to the answers.’
Meet Susan Greene, our first full-time Israel correspondent in nearly seven years. Courtesy of Susan Greene
By Jodi Rudoren January 5, 2024
Susan Greene first traveled to Israel as a kid in the 1970s, to visit close family friends who worked in a restaurant in Haifa. She returned as a young adult, visiting the West Bank homes of some Palestinian friends she’d met while studying abroad in France. She took her own sons, who are now in college, on a touristy trip about a decade ago, and unexpectedly broke down with emotion at the Western Wall.
Now, Susan is heading to the Holy Land to cover the war and its aftermath for the Forward, our first full-time Israel correspondent in nearly seven years.
She is a veteran journalist and nonprofit news entrepreneur who was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a Denver Post series that led to the exoneration of six wrongfully convicted men, and part of the Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer for coverage of the Columbine school shootings. Seeing local news outlets gutted by new owners, she founded The Colorado Independent, a digital site covering politics and criminal justice, in 2012, and eight years later co-founded the Colorado News Collaborative, helping small news organizations work together on big investigations.
When she saw our job posting, Susan said, she got “goose-bumpy” at the prospect of covering one of the world’s most important, complicated and challenging storylines “for an outlet with a long commitment to challenging conventional wisdom among American Jews.”
“I’ve been struggling, like many of you, to make sense of this mess,” she wrote in a Facebook post about her new gig yesterday. “Maybe all that any of us can do is ask better questions of more people and listen more carefully to the answers. I’ve always felt so lucky to do that as my job.”
I’ve been talking and texting with Susan about all things Israel for weeks, and wanted you, our readers, to know what’s behind the new byline you’ll be seeing in our pages. So we had a deeper chat yesterday via Zoom — I caught Susan on her way back from a preview of the National Western Stock Show, Denver’s annual homage to large ranch animals. Which is, perhaps, a story for another day.
What are your strongest memories from your visits to Israel? What do you love — or hate — about it? What intrigues you most?
The first time I went as an adult, I was on a bus to Eilat. We were at a random bus stop and it had rained, and there was a rainbow. And so a man, like, pulled out a prayer you say when there’s a rainbow.
To be with someone who found spirituality upon seeing a rainbow — because that’s where I can kind of get my spirituality from, nature — was just the most moving thing to me ever. That is no doubt my most beautiful Israel moment.
And the last time I was there, being at the Western Wall, and just — I am not very religious at all, like at all, but just literally breaking down in a way that I have never done except maybe once, when I was on acid in college.
My experience in Israel has been one where people are very comfortable with strong opinions. I live now in Denver, where having a strong opinion is a little bit, like, kind of impolite. I find Israel to be the opposite of that, right? It’s a country of strong opinions, and big personalities, and there’s some thing very beautiful about that.
And I love any place where I can get pomegranate juice, fresh squeezed.
You worked at your high school newspaper in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and have a master’s degree in creative nonfiction from Johns Hopkins. What’s your journalism origin story?
I went, at age 16, to this program at Northwestern, because I thought I wanted to be a journalist. And they said, ‘Yeah, you can’t do that’ — or I figured I can’t do that — because I couldn’t have a political sign or give to campaigns. And I do have, like, really big opinions. I thought, well, that cannot be the the job for me, because I’m not a cyborg in that way. So I thought that I would go into academia, comparative literature.
I took a year off before applying to grad school to work as a reporter in the Mojave Desert. I moved from Manhattan to Victorville, California. I covered local politics. How ordinances get passed, where water comes from. I covered a trial of a man who killed, grilled and ate his neighbor’s dog.
It was just so interesting, how could I ever go into academia? Because the act of reporting is literally always being surprised, always having your assumptions turned upside down. And that’s what’s so fun about it, and what’s such a privilege about it.
If you are someone whose serotonin is triggered by curiosity, then the act of having license to ask people questions — and to help them ask questions and get answers that they’ve not been able to get for themselves — is incredible. I mean, everything is just so much more interesting than it is on the surface and than we assume it is.
When I asked for some photos, you sent one of you in red cowboy boots on an empty street during COVID lockdown, and another with a trout you caught fly-fishing. And you just got back from ogling livestock! What’s up with you and the American West?
I fell in love with the West on a Jewish teen tour when I was 15, and I just knew I’d come back here. What did I love? Everything about it! The mountains, the light, the rivers, the sky, the people.
I came here when there were two newspapers — I really wanted a two-newspaper town. I was hired as the bad guy, the bad cop, to cover the mayor for The Denver Post. We had two or three reporters covering him. And I was always the bad cop, the one the mayor doesn’t like, doesn’t talk to.
Because I was writing harder stories. Cronyism, contracts, bond sales. Investigative stuff that you do when you cover a city government. It’s Denver; they weren’t used to that.
Right. You’ve been a political reporter, local and national, a local news columnist, an investigative reporter and editor, winning prizes for projects about DNA exoneration, police misconduct, mental health issues. What appeals to you right now about the Israel story?
Like everyone, I’ve been just glued to this story since Oct. 7. Everything is uncertain. For Israelis and Palestinians and American Jews, the legitimacy of things like the state of Israel, legitimacy of the U.N., the world.
In a time that was already so tumultuous, this so quickly became so preoccupying to me. And also I was frustrated with some of the coverage. I just wanted deeper coverage, I just wanted to be there doing it.
That teen tour where you discovered the West was through a Jewish camp, Tamarack, which you called “a jewel in Michigan.” And the suburb you grew up in, Bloomfield Hills, is more than half Jewish. Tell me more about your Jewish background, Jewish identity.
My grandfather came from the old country. He came as a young man and his entire family and village were wiped out in a pogrom, and he never spoke of it. Ever. And I think that silence has been a huge, formative thing in my upbringing. Just weird and mysterious and kind of painful and just makes me so curious.
My dad’s family was wealthier German Jews who had bought the name Greenberg from a Jewish family in London, and then came here and changed it to Greene and named their sons Donald and Stuart. They were, in many ways, very Jewish and very involved in their very Reform synagogue with the big organ and the rabbi with the fake British accent. But there was no spirituality at all involved in my temple upbringing, like, none. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah. I got confirmed and then never went back.
I think I always identified really with my grandfather’s experience, even though I didn’t know that much about the experience — it was always a source of wonder to me.
Silences really bother me. Kids know, if adults are being quiet about something it’s not like kids don’t feel the power of that silence. So I’m always sort of drawn to the things that are too painful for people to talk about.
My experience in Israel has been one where people really do talk about that stuff, and I like that.
You mentioned pomegranate juice. What other Middle Eastern food do you covet?
I have a huge weakness for knafe. I’ve been making my own from scratch and it’s horrible. The pastry is not thin enough. There’s a squeeze bottle, you squeeze the dough out into a hot nonstick pan. But the hole in the bottle is too big.
In Wag the Dog, one of the characters said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there’s no difference between good flan and bad flan.” To me, there’s no such thing as bad knafe.
You’ve been devouring books about Israel and the Palestinians, obsessively watching a YouTube series of an Israeli man who walks around silently with a GoPro camera, and falling asleep to podcasts about the conflict. What are the big questions on your mind as you head out?
If the premise of Israel is to be a safe place for Jews, do they feel safe now? Do they feel safe after Oct. 7? Do they feel safe after what they’ve done in Gaza? Is there hand-wringing?
What does the world not get about your position? And is it that someone hasn’t asked you in the right way, or told it in the right way. What don’t you want to talk about?
I get that things take a while to talk about. Trauma can take years, it can take decades. You know, in the case of my grandfather, he never talked about it, right?
It is tender, tender territory. I always feel really responsible for not re-traumatizing people. I can totally imagine people hating journalists, hating American journalists, hating some of my questions. You’re going into very touchy, tender places, and I am scared a little bit about what I’ll hear.
But this story needs to be talked about. And I’d like to help tell people’s stories.
What did your mom say when you told her you were taking this job? And your kids — they’re 18 and 20 — what do they think?
There was an uncomfortably long, pregnant pause after I told her. Then she made me promise to check in every day to let her know I’m OK. I get it, and feel bad about making her worry. And about missing her 90th next month.
My kids said, ‘That’s badass, mama. You need to do this. Go for it.’
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