Ellen’s About Me
In the late 1970s I wrote feminist articles for Cambridge’s Real Paper. I went on to report for The Village Voice on the aborning ultra-right-wing settler movement in the West Bank of Israel’s Palestinian territories, the first reporter in the US press to do so. The article was a premonition of the decades of violence settlers would wreak in the West Bank in an effort at ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians there. I have reported through the present about Israel’s occupation of and crimes against the Palestinian people. The Columbia Journalism Review cited my article, “The War for the West Bank,” as the only one in the US and international presses to address the urgent issue of the West Bank reaction to Israel’s 1982 war against Lebanon. My essay on Beita, a West Bank village, was reprinted by the renowned publication Grand Street and anthologized in the volume Intifada, edited by Zachary Lochman and Joel Beinin.
I have also written extensively about the harms of hydraulic fracturing on the environment, on human and on animal health. My oral-history trilogy, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, sold out for 30 years and was taught in colleges and schools worldwide.
My work has been widely reprinted. I bring a perspective of 60 years in the service of justice and peace, and my articles continue being relevant in today’s conflict-ridden world.
In the 1960s a new kind of journalism revolutionized “objective” reporting. It brought the techniques of fiction to real-life events. The Civil Rights movement, Women’s Liberation, the movement against the US war in Vietnam, anti-colonialist movements, and struggles to save the world’s environment, were surging. I was lucky to have been young when all of this was taking place.
My biochemist father and child psychologist mother taught me humanistic and anti-racist values. I was also fortunate to know and to become a personal friend of Noam Chomsky, who immeasurably influenced my views.