Dear RSF:
Please join us in the library at 11:00 on Wednesday, November 6, as our seminar series continues with Visiting Journalist Jude Joffe-Block’s presentation, entitled “America’s Toughest: The Civil Rights Fight against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.”
Joffe-Block is co-authoring a book to be published by University of California Press with Terry Green Sterling, Writer-in-Residence and affiliated faculty member at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. The book explores how Arizona’s divisions over immigration in the mid-2000s prefigured the nation’s current polarization—how former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio transformed into a zealous immigration enforcer, a grassroots movement advocating for Latino and immigrant rights organized in the streets and courts to stop Arpaio’s unconstitutional tactics, and the fight over immigration and civil rights became a national battle under Trump.
Joffe-Block received a BA in History from Yale in 2004 and MA in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, where she won the Dean’s prize for Excellence in Radio Reporting. She has written radio and online stories for NPR, The Guardian, Newsweek.com and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. From 2010-2017 she was the Senior Field Correspondent for the NPR Phoenix station, covering immigration, changing demographics, the border and politics. As Las Vegas correspondent, she helped to launch the Fronteras Desk, a network of regional public radio stations in the Southwest. Phoenix Magazine named her “best investigative radio reporter” in 2017, and she won an Arizona Press Club award for Community reporting in 2019.
Two of her Arpaio pieces are linked below: