Goldziher 2025 Award Recipients
The 2025 Goldziher Prize recognized five initiatives and organizations, that taken together, advance religion reporting in journalism education, support young Palestinian refugee journalists, bring together journalists across MENA to strengthen coverage of minority communities, amplify peacebuilders, and elevate MENA voices in U.S. media.
The 2025 Goldziher Prize did not proceed as an open competition. The awards instead recognized initiatives and organizations selected through consultation. Two of the recognized organizations include leaders who had originally been invited to serve as judges; those individuals did not participate in the selection of award recipients.
Please visit the Goldziher Prize homepage for additional context on this year’s proceedings.
VII Foundation’s Dispatches in Exile Fellowship is a four-month pilot designed to support rigorous reporting from a Palestinian perspective through mentorship of a young Gazan journalist. The fellow will produce two published pieces on displacement, identity, and return, with a focus on diasporic communities and the societies that host them. Through close mentorship and one-to-one editing, the fellowship counters dehumanizing narratives and fosters grounded, humane, evidence-based reporting.
Principals: Carla E. Power and Tara Bahrampour bring decades of experience covering migration, identity, and global affairs for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time.
Carla E. Power is the author of “Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022; and “If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran,” a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award finalist. She began her journalism career reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her reportage and essays have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian. “The Lady Imam,” her biography of the Islamic feminist theologian amina wadud, is due out from Penguin/Random House imprint One World in 2026. Power is currently at work on a memoir, “Child of Empire: The Making of an American Imperialist.”
Tara Bahrampour is a journalist and writer who spent two decades at The Washington Post covering topics such as aging, demography, immigration, education, the Russia-Georgia war and the Arab Spring. She is the author of the memoir To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, O, and more. Tara has taught journalism at New York University and the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, Georgia. She lives in Washington, DC and has been a Fellowship Coach with The OpEd Project since 2024.
VII Foundation, Dispatches in Exile Fellowship
The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association
The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association: was founded in 2005 in New York City by a small number of people working for various media organizations, who recognized a commonality of interests and issues facing journalists in the US of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) heritage. The organization’s mission is to provide peer support for members as they advance in their careers, to offer a forum to discuss professional issues, encourage young people of MENA heritage to pursue careers in journalism, and to improve and provide nuanced coverage of the MENA region and its peoples, as well as its heritage communities in different parts of the world.
Principal: Aymann Ismail is President and staff writer at Slate and author of “Becoming Baba” (Doubleday, 2025). Ismail is a podcast host and producer, as well as a video editor and photographer. His work focuses on how identity and religion interact with politics. He wrote and produced Who's Afraid of Aymann Ismail?, a video series that moves beyond stereotypes of both American Muslims and their self-professed adversaries, finding hope and fault in both.
Aymann hosts "Man Up," a weekly interview podcast on Slate about men, relationships, family, race, and sex. He's been featured on CNN, Adweek, GQ, HuffPost, and NPR, and holds a BFA in Visual Arts and Film from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick and author of “Becoming Baba” (Doubleday, 2025)
Covering Religion, Columbia School of Journalism
Formerly created by professors Ari Goldman and Gregory Khalil, Covering Religion trains journalists to report with depth, sensitivity, and impartiality, focusing on empathetic storytelling, diverse perspectives beyond politics, and practical skills through case studies and field trips, emphasizing ethical reporting on deeply felt topics. Please see Empathetic Objectivity: A Strategy for Journalists
Principal: Aida Alami is a James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment issues at CSJ. She is a journalist, reporter, and visiting professor known for her international reporting on migration, human rights, religion, race, and global affairs. Alami has been a regular contributor to NYTimes and The New York Review of Books. Alami reports from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, the U.S. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Senegal. was a contributor to the anthology Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World.
Ami Kaufman is a print and broadcast journalist. He headed the night desks of Israel's leading newspapers (including Haaretz), co-founded the groundbreaking +972 Magazine, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian journalists and continues to break major stories from the region, and hosted his own show, The Spin Room on i24NEWS, where politicians and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic debated the hottest issues in Israeli and U.S. politics. Now based in London, he is Writer/Producer for CNN’s global flagship ‘Amanpour’ news and current affairs show. His work at CNN also includes an Emmy-nominated investigation into abuses at the Sde Teiman detention facility. Throughout the war in Gaza, Ami worked to amplify Israeli and Palestinian voices committed to bridge-building and peacemaking amid deepening division and despair.
Ami Kaufman
International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ)
International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) will host the 2026 conference, Reporting Religion in the Arab World: Challenges and Best Practices.
Reporting on religion is a challenge for any journalist, and especially so where religion—and the observance of its rituals—forms an integral part of communal life. The duty to report fully and accurately requires an understanding of the religious and cultural contexts in which journalists work.
This conference will explore these challenges in the Arab world and share best practices across a region comprising 22 sovereign states. While Islam is the majority religion, many also include diverse religious minorities where effective reporting depends on respecting and understanding all religious traditions, including the dominant faith, which itself encompasses a range of beliefs and practices.
The conference will bring together journalists—primarily from countries across the region reflecting both Islam and its religious diversity—to discuss ways to strengthen their reporting. They will be joined by international journalists who offer perspectives from outside the region. Conference objectives:
Exploring religion journalism as a distinct journalistic genre
Sharing best practices in religion reporting worldwide
Strengthening accuracy and depth in religion reporting in the Arab world
Drawing attention to training needs in religion journalism
Building collegiality among journalists from different faiths and traditions.
Principals: Peggy Stack, Executive Director of IARJ and founding member. Stack offers collegial forums for dialogue and cooperation, online, in-person training, and a wealth of resources and data to promote better coverage of religious issues. Stack is a veteran religion reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune in Utah, USA. She was hired at the Tribune in 1991 to cover Utah’s various faiths, particularly Mormonism. Peggy has talked forgiveness with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, nearly fainted waiting for the Dalai Lama, fasted with Muslims during Ramadan — and has reported on 50 consecutive semiannual LDS General Conferences. Stack has won dozens of religion-writing awards. Her team at the Tribune won a Pulitzer in 2017.
Prof. Mohammed Lazrak Ph.D, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez Morocco