JSPA Leadership

The board members and officers of the Jewish Scholastic Press Association represent journalists, educators and Jewish thinkers based in cities arond the United States.  Here are their photos and short biographies.

 

Joelle Keene is the Founding President and Executive Director of the Jewish Scholastic Press Association. From 2003 through 2024, Ms. Keene taught music and journalism at Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles, where she advised the school’s newspaper, The Boiling Point, and directed its co-ed a capella choir, the Choirhawks.

During her tenure, the Boiling Point won scores of nationalawards for writing, design, website and multimedia coverage, among them 11 Gold and 2 Silver Crowns from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association; Online Pacemaker and Print Pacemaker Finalist awards from the National Scholastic Press Association, the George Gallup Award and Sweepstakes awards from the Quill & Scroll Honorary Journalism Society; and numerous Simon R. Rockower Awards from the American Jewish Press Association, of which the Boiling Point was the only student member publication.

Ms. Keene has been designated a Master Journalism Educator by the national Journalism Education Association since 2014. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and worked for the Tacoma News-Tribune, Seattle Times and Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, winning national, state and local awards for education coverage and investigative reporting.  She later served as Associate Editor of OLAM Magazine and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, eJewishPhilanthropy, Reform Judaism Magazine, chabad.org, and Shema Bekolah, the 2023 High Holy Day collection of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.

 

 

Susan Freudenheim, JSPA treasurer, was executive editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2011, overseeing the paper’s online and weekly editorial staff.  Prior to the Journal, she spent 13 years as an editor and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, including serving as a longtime arts editor, a senior position in the Times’ Calendar Section.

She also is the former executivedirector of Jewish World Watch, a nonprofit that fights genocide and mass atrocities through education, advocacy and projects on-the-ground in conflict areas.  Ms. Freudenheim has also written for the New York Times and other national magazines and newspapers. One of JSPA’s founding board members, she has served as lead  judge of the Jewish Scholastic Journalism Awards since 2017.

 

 

Lisa Hostein became the Executive Editor of Hadassah Magazine in November 2015, making her the first female journalist to lead the 100-plus year-old publication. Earlier she served nearly 15 years as editor in chief of JTA, the global Jewish news agency based in New York, and eight as the executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.

Ms. Hostein is also a board member of the American Jewish Press Association, where she has long served on the executive committee. She has received AJPA’s Award for Distinguished Service to Jewish Journalism, and now is its official representative to JSPA’s board.  She has won numerous awards from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, the Philadelphia Press Association and the AJPA, and led her staffs to dozens of awards as well.

A longtime observer and chronicler of political, religious, social and demographic developments in American Jewish life, she also has traveled widely and written about Jewish communities in Tunisia, Turkey, Argentina, France, India, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

 

Gary Rosenblatt has spent his professional life in the field of Jewish journalism.  He was editor and publisher of The Jewish Week of New York, the largest and most respected community Jewish newspaper in America, from 1993 to 2019. Prior to that he was editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times for 19 years. He now writes regularly on Jewish life for his Substack newsletter, “Between The Lines.”

Mr. Rosenblatt has won numerous awards from both the Jewish and secular press for his writing. He was one of two finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 — the first time an article in the Jewish media was cited in the competition.  His investigative series in 2000 on a prominent rabbi accused of abusing teens in his charge for more than three decades made international headlines and resulted in a jail sentence for the rabbi.

He also helped found several programs at The Jewish Week directed at young people, including “Fresh Ink,” a webzine written for and by high school students, and “Write On For Israel,” a  two-year Israel education program to prepare high school students through journalism for the campus experience.

 

Talya Tsuna, JSPA secretary, is the Director of  College Guidance at Barkai Yeshivah High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., after serving for 27 years as Director of Student Advancement and College Guidance at both the boys and girls campuses of the Margolin Hebrew Academy – Feinstone Yeshiva of the South in Memphis, Tenn.  In Memphis, she advised the high school Model UN team and the middle school’s newspaper, and taught Hebrew, Jewish History and English.

At Barkai, Ms. Tsuna advisers the Sunrise Spotlight,  now in its second year of publication,  She and her schools have been active members of JSPA since 2014, Ms. Tsuna has brought students to the yearly convention nearly every year.

Ms. Tsuna is also an active member of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC) and part of its Special Section for counselors who work with Jewish students.  She also serves on the English Language Arts (ELA) Advisory Board of Facing History and Ourselves, and speaks on Holocaust education.

 

 

Eitan Arom is an associate at KTBS Law in Los Angeles, where he is a litigator in bankruptcy cases.  Before law school he worked as a journalist in Jerusalem, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. including for Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal where covered local issues ranging from civic engagement and culture to Holocaust memory, faith-based activism and politics. Serving as senior writer, he also covered the plight of the Yazidis in (and outside of) Iraq, which was groundbreaking at the time, and gave a memorable talk at JSPA’s 2014 conference about how to use journalism to save lives.

Mr. Arom graduated magna cum laude from UCLA, where served as a writer and editor for the Daily Bruin, and he has currently servesdas a member of the UCLA Communications Board, which publishes the Bruin and other student publications.

He earned his law degree from Columbia Law School , graduating with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Prize — Columbia’s highest academic honor — and serving as Executive Notes Editor for the Columbia Law Review. After law school, Mr. Arom clerked for the Honorable Mark E. Recktenwald, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hawaii.

 

 

Marshall Weiss, Board Member Emeritus, is the founding Editor-in-Chief and publisher of the Dayton Jewish Observer in Ohio and is the author of Jewish Community of Dayton, a detailed account of the history of the city’s Jewish community from the 1840s until 2000. One of JSPA’s founding board members. Mr. Weiss served as president of the American Jewish Press Association, the umbrella organization for Jewish news media in North America, from 2012 to 2015, and initiated AJPA’s ongoing co-sponsorship of JSPA.