Orit Arfa

Orit Arfa is a modern Renaissance woman: a painter, author, journalist, singer/songwriter, political commentator, and media personality.

A native of Los Angeles, Orit’s works are informed by an ethical dialectic that flows from her Jewish education and tradition. Her father was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany to Holocaust survivors, while her mother was born in Iraq on the eve of the mass Iraqi Jewish emigration to Israel in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms.

Her art and journalism career has spanned Los Angeles, New York, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and now Berlin, where she currently lives as a journalist, writer, painter, and media personality.

ART EDUCATION: Orit started painting already in nursery. In first grade, her pictures of trees and people were the talk of the four-year-old town. Noticing her gift, her parents enrolled her in art classes at Mission: Renaissance, a private art school with branches all over the world, specializing in representational style, which she continued all the way through high school. Her teacher, Bentley Richards, encouraged her to pursue professional painting. During college, Orit took classes at UCLA and Stern College for women, where she also studied art history and explored less representational forms of art.

JEWISH STUDIES/JOURNALISM
While most of her college peers were bar hopping, Orit went college-hopping in search of “The Truth.” After stints at Columbia University, Stern College for Women, Bar Ilan University, and UCLA, she graduated with a BA in Jewish studies and a minor in journalism from American Jewish University.

She began her journalism career in New York at the Forward, and eventually became a regular contributor for The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She moved to Israel in 1999 and continued to write about politics, society, lifestyle and travel for a variety of publications, most notably The Jerusalem Post. In 20...