Bret Louis Stephens (born November 21, 1973) is an American conservative columnist,[1][2][3] journalist, and editor. He has been an opinion columnist for The New York Times and a senior contributor to NBC News since 2017. Since 2021, he has been the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.
Stephens was born in New York City,[4] the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico.[5][6] 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.[7] His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in 1901 in Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova). He fled with his family to New York after the Kishinev pogrom and changed the family surname to Stephens (after poet James Stephens).[8] Louis Stephens moved to Mexico City, where he founded General Products and built his fortune.[9] 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.[9] Bret was raised there and is fluent in Spanish.[10] As a teenager, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.
He is married to Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, a New York Times music critic. They have three children, and live in New York City.[12][13] He was previously married to Pamela Paul, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review.[6]
Journalism career
Stephens in 2008
Stephens began his career as an assistant editor at Commentary magazine in 1995–96.[14]
In 2002, Stephens moved to Israel to become the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.[18] 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.[17] 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.[18] "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."[18] 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.[18]
Stephens left The Jerusalem Post in 2004 and returned to The Wall Street Journal.[19] In 2006, he took over the Journal's "Global View" column.
In 2017, Stephens left the Journal, joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist,[20] and began appearing as an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.[21]
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."[24][25] He is a national judge of the Livingston Award.[26][27] In 2015, Stephens joined the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences.[28] The Real-Time Academy judges contestants for the Shorty Awards, which honor the best individuals and organizations on social media.[29]
Stephens spoke at the University of Chicago's 2023 Class Day, during convocation weekend. His invitation provoked backlash from various student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, for his views about Israel.[32]
Published works
Stephens's book America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder was released in November 2014.[16] In it, he argues that the US has been retreating from its role as the "world's policeman" in recent decades, which will lead to ever-greater world problems.
Controversy
George Washington University
In August 2019, Stephens sent a complaint to a George Washington University (GWU) professor and the university's provost about a tweet in which the professor called Stephens a "bedbug".[33][34] 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.[35][36][37] The controversy gained massive attention online, leading to then-president Donald Trump tweeting, "lightweight journalist Bret Stephens, a Conservative who does anything that his bosses at the paper tell him to do! He is now quitting Twitter after being called a 'bedbug.' Tough guy!"[38][39]
Comments about antisemitism, race
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal published a column by Stephens about an Egyptian judoka refusing to shake hands with his Israeli opponent after an Olympic match, in which Stephens called antisemitism "the disease of the Arab mind".[40] Some readers criticized this as a racist generalization that all Arabs were antisemitic. After Stephens joined The New York Times, several reporters at the newspaper criticized Stephens's previous writings.[41]
In a December 2019 column titled "The Secrets of Jewish Genius",[42] in which he contended that Ashkenazi Jews have a history of alternative thinking which has led them to be successful. This article 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."[43][44] 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.[45] 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.[45][46] The Times's deletion was criticized by Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen, and Steven Pinker, who called it "surrender to an outrage mob".[47]
In February 2021, Stephens wrote a column critical of the Times's dismissal of Donald McNeil for using a racial slur against African Americans in the context of a discussion with students of the slur's usage. Six students present on the occasion said that McNeil had used the word "in a way that they perceived as casual, unnecessary or even gratuitous", but one of them added that "McNeil's opinions didn't disparage African Americans".[48] The Timesspiked the column,[49][50] but it was leaked to the New York Post, which published it.[51] Stephens principally argued against the editor's initial position that the newspaper would "not tolerate racist language regardless of intent";[49][51] the editor subsequently backed down from that position.[49][50]
Political views
Foreign policy
Foreign policy was one of the central subjects of the columns for which Stephens won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.[25] Critics have characterized his foreign policy opinions as neoconservative, part of a right-wing political movement associated with President George W. Bush that advocates the use of military force abroad, particularly in the Middle East, as a way of promoting democracy there.[52][53] Stephens was a "prominent voice" among the media advocates for the start of the 2003 Iraq War,[52] for instance writing in a 2002 column that, unless checked, Iraq was likely to become the first nuclear power in the Arab world.[54] Although the weapons of mass destruction used as a casus belli were never shown to exist, Stephens continued to insist as late as 2013 that the Bush administration had "solid evidence" for going to war.[54] He has also argued strongly against the Iran nuclear deal and its preliminary agreements, claiming that they are a worse bargain even than the 1938 Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany.[54]
Stephens considers climate change a "20-year-old mass hysteria phenomenon" and rejects the notion that greenhouse-gas emissions are an environmental threat. According to him, "it isn't science" and belongs in the "realm of belief" as it is a "sick-souled religion".[56] He also mocks climate change activism as hysterical alarmism,[63] denying that any significant temperature change will occur in the next 100 years[64] and arguing that it distracts from more important issues, such as terrorism.[65] Stephens claims that global warming activism is based on theological beliefs, rather than science, as an outgrowth of Western tendencies to expect punishment for sins.[56] He has also suggested that activists would be more persuasive if they were less sure of their beliefs.[58][66] Stephens's positions on this issue led to a protest in 2013 over his Pulitzer citation omitting his climate change columns,[63] and to a strong backlash against his 2017 hiring by The New York Times.[3][61][66] In reaction, The New York Times praised Stephens's "intellectual honesty and fairness".[62] As of October 28, 2022, Stephens said that he had come to accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change after a trip to Greenland with climate scientist John Englander, although he believes that markets are more effective than government at addressing the problem.[67]
Gun rights
Stephens disagrees with the mainstream conservative support for the Second Amendment and has called for its repeal, but he does not support a ban on gun ownership.[68][69]
^ abcd"New York Times hire of conservative scribe Bret Stephens seen as move to widen readership". Fox News. April 17, 2017. While Stephens has garnered moderate praise from the left for being anti-Trump, he has written on other topics that may anger most Times readers. His views on climate change have created the strongest backlash, so far, with liberal site ThinkProgress questioning the hire on Wednesday and calling the writer is a climate science denier.
^Bob Minzesheimer (interviewer) (January 17, 2015). "After Words with Bret Stephens". After Words. C-SPAN. 12:10 minutes in. Retrieved September 3, 2019. First of all, I was born in New York and I'm wondering why Wikipedia keeps insisting that i was born in Mexico. But I was born to a father who had been born in Mexico and had a family business there...
^Balint, Judy Lash (January 23, 2003). "Getting To Know You". Israel Insider. Retrieved September 3, 2019.
^da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna (March 20, 2012). "Prelude and Fugue". Tablet: A new read on Jewish life. Archived from the original on November 12, 2013.
^Commentary, January 1996 (Volume 101, Issue 1), Unindexed Front Matter.
^ ab"The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners: Commentary". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 17, 2013. With short biography and reprints of ten works (WSJ articles January 24 to December 11, 2012).
^ abcFrom The Iraq War To Climate Change To Sexual Assault, NY Times' New Op-Ed Columnist, Bret Stephens, Is A Serial Misinformer, Media Matters for America, April 13, 2017
^ ab"Bret Stephens' First Column for the New York Times Is Classic Climate Change Denialism". Slate. Retrieved May 3, 2017. That Stephens doesn't bother to cite which climate-change facts are uncertain may be because he knows exactly what he is doing, and he's aware he wouldn't win that argument. Or it may be because he himself has fallen prey to his own argument about epistemic uncertainty, and so he no longer thinks the evidence matters. Either way, his accusation—that it is not the facts you should question, but the entire system that creates facts at all—is terrifying.
^ abCorneliussen, Steven T. (April 17, 2013). "Bret Stephens, harsh Wall Street Journal critic of climate scientists, wins Pulitzer Prize: The award recognizes only certain columns from 2012, none reflecting his climate-wars participation". Physics Today. American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/PT.4.2441..
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