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Ronald Rosenbaum (born November 27, 1946) is an Americanliterary journalist,[1]literary critic, andnovelist.
Rosenbaum was born into aJewish family inNew York City and grew up inBay Shore, New York, onLong Island. He graduated fromYale University in 1968 and won aCarnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program inEnglish Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course.
Rosenbaum began his career as an editor ofThe Fire Island News and then wrote forThe Village Voice for several years, leaving in 1975 after which he wrote forEsquire,Harper's,High Times,Vanity Fair,New York Times Magazine, andSlate.
Rosenbaum spent more than ten years doing research onAdolf Hitler including travels toVienna,Munich,London,Paris, andJerusalem, interviewing leadinghistorians,philosophers,biographers,theologians andpsychologists. Some of those interviewed by Rosenbaum includedDaniel Goldhagen,David Irving, Rudolph Binion,Claude Lanzmann,Hugh Trevor-Roper,Alan Bullock,Christopher Browning,George Steiner, andYehuda Bauer. The result was his 1998 book,Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.
InExplaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum also recounted in detail the previously little-reported story of the efforts of anti-Hitler journalists at theMunich Post who, from 1920 to 1933, published repeated exposés on the criminal activities of theNational Socialist German Workers Party (i.e. the Nazis). Matthew Ricketson, coordinator of the Journalism program atRMIT University's School of Applied Communication inMelbourne, Australia, called this book "a brilliant piece of research".[2]
In 1987, he began writing a weekly column for theNew York Observer called "The Edgy Enthusiast". He wrote a column forSlate called "The Spectator"; as of 2024, its last post was in 2016. In 2009, one of Rosenbaum's Spectator columns was a lengthy sardonic critique of pop music iconBilly Joel entitled "The Worst Pop Singer Ever."
InThe Shakespeare Wars, he wrote about recent controversies among literary historians, actors, and directors over how the works ofWilliam Shakespeare should be read, understood, and produced.
His bookHow the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III (2011), addresses the paradoxes of deterrence, the danger of nuclear proliferation, and whether the bomb comprises an argument about warfare and genocide.
In December 2015, Rosenbaum published the article "Thinking the Unthinkable", in which he expresses his view that there exists a frightening possibility thatIsrael might not survive as a nation. In it, he writes that, "The Palestinians want a Hitlerite Judenrein state, however much violence it takes to accomplish it. Not separation, elimination." The Palestinians are, he asserts, engaged in incessant state and religious incitement to murder Jews. The "stabbing intifada" is not an insurgency, but a matter of "the ritual murder of Jews". Whereas Hitler tried to hide his crimes, the Palestinians celebrate killing Jews.[3]
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