Bret Stephens

Bret Stephens was born in New York City,[3] the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico.[4][5] Both his parents were secular Jews. His mother was born in Italy at the start of World War II to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.[6] His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in Kishenev (today Chișinău, Moldova) in 1901. He fled with his family to New York after a pogrom and changed the family surname to Stephens (after poet James Stephens).[7] Louis Stephens moved to Mexico City, where he founded General Products and built his fortune.[8] He married Annette Margolis and had two sons, Charles and Luis. Charles married Xenia. They moved to Mexico City with their newborn son, Bret, to help run the chemical company, inherited from Louis.[8] Bret was raised in Mexico City and is fluent in Spanish.[9] As a teenager, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Massachusetts.

Stephens earned an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and a master's degree in comparative politics[10] at the London School of Economics.

He is married to Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, a New York Times music critic. They have three children and live in New York City.[11][12] He was previously married to Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review.[5]

Stephens in 2008

Stephens began his career as an assistant editor at Commentary magazine in 1995–96.[13] In 1998 he joined The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed editor.[14] He later worked as an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, in Brussels.[15] Stephens edited the weekly "State of the Union" column on the European Union.[16]

In 2002, Stephens moved to Israel to become the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.[17] He was 28 years old. Haaretz reported at the time that the appointment of Stephens, a non-Israeli, triggered some unease among senior Jerusalem Post management and staff.[16] Stephens said that one of the reasons he left The Wall Street Journal for The Jerusalem Post was that he believed that Western media was getting Israel's story wrong.[17] "I do not think Israel is the aggressor here", he said. "Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I'm trying to help Israel."[17] Stephens led The Jerusalem Post during the worst years of the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombings against Israel and pointed the paper in a more neoconservative direction.[17] In 2003, The Jerusalem Post named Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, its Man of the Year.[17] Stephens left The Jerusalem Post in 2004 and returned to The Wall Street Journal.[18] In 2006, he took over the Journal's "Global View" column after George Melloan's retirement.

In 2017, Stephens left the Journal, joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist,[2] and began appearing as an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.[19]

In 2005, the World Economic Forum named Stephens a Young Global Leader.[15] He won the 2008 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism.[20] In 2009, he was named deputy editorial page editor after Melanie Kirkpatrick's retirement. In 2010, Stephens won the Bastiat Prize.[15]

Stephens won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist."[21][22] He is a national judge of the Livingston Award.[23][24] In 2015, Stephens joined the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences.[25] The Real-Time Academy judges contestants for the Shorty Awards, which honor the best individuals and organizations on social media.[26]

Stephens has chaired two Pulitzer juries.[24] In 2016, he chaired the jury that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting to Alyssa Rubin of The New York Times.[27] In 2017, Stephens chaired the jury that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing to Art Cullen of The Storm Lake Times.[28]

Stephens's book America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder was released in November 2014.[15] In it, he argues that the U.S. has been retreating from its role as the "world's policeman" in recent decades, which will lead to ever-greater world problems.

In August 2019, Stephens sent a complaint to a George Washington University professor and the university's provost about a tweet in which the professor called Stephens a "bedbug."[29][30] The topic of Stephens's next column was the "rhetoric of infestation" used by authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. The column was interpreted as criticism of the GWU professor and other critics of Stephens.[31][32][33]

In December 2019, Stephens's column "The Secrets of Jewish Genius",[34] in which he contended that Ashkenazi Jews have superior intelligence, led to accusations of eugenics and racism. The column originally said that "Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different."[35][36] Following widespread criticism, The New York Times editors deleted the section of the column in which he appeared to claim that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically superior to other groups.[37] The editors said that Stephens erred in citing an academic study by an author with "racist views" whose 2005 paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.[37][38]

• America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder (November 2014), ISBN 978-1591846628
• Has Obama Made the World a More Dangerous Place?: The Munk Debate on U.S. Foreign Policy (August 2015), ISBN 978-1770899964
• The Dying Art of Disagreement (December 2017), ISBN 9780648018902

• Appearances on C-SPAN