Jonathan S. Tobin

Jonathan S. Tobin was born in New York City, educated at local schools and studied history at Columbia University.

Tobin's opinion columns[1] appear in the Jewish News Syndicate on a daily basis. He is also a contributing writer[2] for National Review, a conservative magazine of opinion and ideas, a columnist[3] for the New York Post, a contributor[4] for The Federalist, a columnist[5] for Haaretz, a columnist[6] for the New York Jewish Week, a contributor to the Gatestone Institute, a far-right think tank known for publishing anti-Muslim articles,[lower-alpha 1] and to the Israeli magazine, MiDA.[7][8]

He is a frequent commentator on domestic politics, Israel, and Jewish affairs. His column, "View from America,"[9] appeared for many years in The Jerusalem Post. His work has also appeared in Israel Hayom, the Christian Science Monitor, The Forward, Britain's Jewish Chronicle, the New York Sun and many other publications. Tobin lectures widely across the United States on college campuses and to Jewish organizations and synagogues. He tours North America debating political and Jewish issues[10] with J.J. Goldberg of The Forward and has appeared on CNN, BBC Radio, Fox News, Newsmax, i24News and local network affiliates to discuss politics, foreign policy and Jewish issues.

From 2009 to 2011, he was executive editor of Commentary, a neo-conservative monthly magazine. From 2011 to 2017, he was senior online editor and chief political blogger at Commentary and the author[11] of feature articles, reviews and blog posts[12] there. Tobin was executive editor of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia from 1998 through 2008. Prior to that he was executive editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.

In 2003, Tobin told an interviewer that Jewish journalism has improved in quality over the last 20 years, but that there are constraints because many American Jewish newspapers are owned by Jewish federations, rather than being independent corporations. This problem, he said, is not different from the problems faced by other newspapers: "Nobody at The Philadelphia Inquirer reports aggressively on Knight Ridder Corp." He told an interviewer for The New York Times that "My job as editor is to talk about things people are not willing to talk about."[13] In the same article, the Times wrote that "In his three-year tenure at The Ledger, an independently owned newspaper, Mr. Tobin, a Long Island native, has turned the once-stodgy weekly into a plucky newspaper with stories on abuses at a local Jewish nursing home and domestic violence among Jews."

Tobin was profiled in the Philadelphia Business Journal on July 26, 2002[14]) and in Press, the magazine of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, in its November 2002 issue.

He was named top editorial columnist and best arts critic in Philadelphia for the year 2005 by the Society of Professional Journalists.[15]

• Appearances on C-SPAN