Julia Ioffe

Julia Ioffe (Юлия Иоффе; born 18 October 1982) is a Russian-born American journalist.

Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Republic, Politico, and The Atlantic.

Ioffe has appeared on television programs on MSNBC, CBS, PBS, and other news channels as a Russia expert.

She is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.

Ioffe was born in Moscow, to a Russian Jewish family.

On April 28, 1990, when she was 7 years old, she and her family immigrated to New York City in the United States.

They settled in Columbia, Maryland, where she grew up.

Ioffe attended Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School from which she graduated in 2001.

In a college newspaper column published in 2003, she was quoted as supporting Israel's "methods of defense against terrorism", including the construction of the Israeli West Bank Wall.

According to Ioffe, the wall was "necessary for Israel to protect its citizens against suicide bombers".

Ioffe worked for the Columbia Journalism School's Knight Case Studies Initiative.

After originally planning to be a doctor, Ioffe graduated with a degree in Soviet history from Princeton University in 2005.

Her thesis, "Selling Utopia: Soviet Propaganda and the Spanish Civil War", was supervised by Jan T. Gross.

While at Princeton, Ioffe was vice-president of the Princeton Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In 2009, Ioffe won a Fulbright Scholarship to work in Russia.

Ioffe spent three years in Moscow, from 2009 to 2012, working as a correspondent for The New Yorker and Foreign Policy.

Ioffe was a finalist for the Livingston Award for her 2011 profile of Alexei Navalny, then a lawyer and anti-corruption activist.

Ioffe covered protests and the political manoeuvring surrounding Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency, in her column “Kremlinology 2012,” which was published in Foreign Policy.

In February 2012, The New Yorker published her profile of Mikhail Prokhorov, then the third-richest man in Russia who contested the 2012 presidential elections.

“Are Putin and Prokhorov running for President against or with each other?” Ioffe asked in the profile.

During the most violent protest, which took place on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin's inauguration, Ioffe took a photo of a small boy on a bicycle with training wheels, facing a row of Russian riot police.

The image was widely seen.

In 2012, Ioffe returned to the U.S. and became a senior editor for The New Republic in Washington, D.C.

At The New Republic, Ioffe wrote about American politics, including about a brewing civil war within the Republican Party.

Her 2013 profile of Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul was a finalist for the Livingston Award.

In 2013, Ioffe wrote about contracting whooping cough, although she had been vaccinated against the disease in childhood.

She blamed the anti-vaxxer community for her illness.

Ioffe continued writing about Russia, including about the 2013 anti-gay laws and the Kremlin's ban on American adoptions of Russian children.

In 2013, Ioffe visited Moscow to document what happened to the opposition after the 2012 crackdown.

Among others, she interviewed Alexey Navalny, future presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, and members of Pussy Riot.

She also covered the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

Her article, “The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin,” appeared in The New Republic in February 2014.

While covering the 2014 Sochi Olympics for The New Republic, Ioffe traveled to Ukraine, where pro-Western protestors had toppled the Moscow-friendly president.

She predicted that Russia would invade Eastern Ukraine after its annexation of Crimea.

She also traveled to Eastern Ukraine to cover the war in Donbas.

In December 2014, Ioffe was one of the many staff members at The New Republic to resign in protest against owner Chris Hughes's planned changes at the magazine.

Her emails and comments were cited by Ryan Lizza in an article for The New Yorker about the changes at The New Republic.

In March 2018, Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced a book deal with Ioffe.

The book, Russia Girl, was slated for publication in 2020; as of April 2022 it was due in 2023.

Ioffe is the Washington correspondent for the website Puck.