The voice of National Public Radio’s Israel news works out of a studio in the basement of her Jerusalem apartment.
“I really like the combination of being there when the kids come home from school and also being able to go to the basement, lock the door and work,” said Linda Gradstein, who has been a contributor to NPR’s Israel coverage since 1990.
Gradstein, 46, was in the Bay Area this week, where she spoke Oct. 26 and 27 at the Hillels at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley.
For Gradstein, it was a homecoming of sorts. She lived in Palo Alto as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University during the 1998-99 school year. She considers the year an important turning point in her career.
“In daily journalism, you’re always running after the next story, so that you never have time to think long-term about where a story is going or where you’re going,” Gradstein said. “The fellowship gave me time to breathe.”
While at Stanford, she also studied creative writing, which she had never before tried, with Tobias Wolff, a memoirist and short-story author.
“It really helped me to tell a story not only correctly, but to tell it in a way that makes people connect to it,” she said.
Gradstein, grew up on Long Island in New York. She was 12 years old when she first visited Israel, for her bat mitzvah.
“I sort of fell in love with the country,” she said. “I liked its informality, its physical beauty … and that strangers talked to teach other.”
She studied foreign service as an undergraduate at Georgetown Univers-ity, which is when she became more observant, eventually becoming an Orthodox Jew.
After graduate school, Gradstein moved to Israel with the intention of becoming an academic or joining the foreign service.
That’s not exactly what happened. Gradstein fell into journalism when she began working as a Hebrew and Arabic translator for American reporters working in Israel during the first intifada. She was 25.
Gradstein soon became the one with the notebook and tape recorder.
“Israel is a fabulous place to be a reporter,” she said. “It’s always exciting and it’s still a story the world cares about. People are willing to talk to you … Knesset members’ phone numbers are listed in the phone book. You can call them up at home and chat with them. I personally really like that informality.”
Over the years, Gradstein has covered the first and second intifadas, the mass immigration of Soviet immigrants to Israel, the return of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Gaza, the rise of Hamas, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Persian Gulf War, and Israeli elections.
She traveled to Gaza just two weeks ago to gather information for a story she’s working on about reconstruction efforts since the war and the increasing religiosity of the people there.
The trip was difficult emotionally, Gradstein said, because she saw such extreme poverty and felt a sense of hopelessness among many of the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there.
“It’s hard to see that and feel that and get back in your car, drive to the border and cross back into Israel where people have cafés and restaurants and a sense of possibilities for their future.
“You think about the people you just met and left behind, and you look at these kids and wonder: What kind of future will these children have?”
At the other end of the spectrum, Gradstein’s reporting also takes her into the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
As an Orthodox Jewish woman, she doesn’t work on Shabbat, and finds that her background actually helps her gain access into a group of people who are wary of American and Israeli journalists.
For instance, the rabbi who presided over her wedding lives in the West Bank and at one time was the mayor of his settlement. Which is to say, Gradstein has connections.
“I can call someone in the West Bank and say ‘Rabbi Berkowitz suggested I call you,’ ” she said. “It helps give me access to certain sectors of the population that are very closed and don’t particularly like the press.”