Peter Beinart

Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa (his maternal grandfather was from Russia, and his maternal grandmother, who was Sephardic, was from Egypt).[5][6][7] His father's parents were from Lithuania.[8] His mother, Doreen (née Pienaar), is a former director of the human-rights film program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,[9] and his father, Julian Beinart, is a former professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] His stepfather is theatre critic and playwright Robert Brustein.[10] Beinart attended Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge.

He studied history and political science at Yale College, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union and graduated in 1993 with the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford University, where he earned an M.Phil. in international relations in 1995.[11]

Beinart worked at The New Republic as the managing editor from 1995 to 1997, then as senior editor until 1999, and as the magazine's editor from 1999 to 2006. For much of that time he also wrote The New Republic's "TRB" column, which was reprinted in the New York Post and other newspapers. From 2007 until 2009 he was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He has written for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other periodicals. He has appeared on various TV news discussion programs and is a political commentator for CNN.[11] His editor-in-chief at the Forward called him a "wunderkind".[12][13] In March 2012, Beinart launched a new blog, "Open Zion", at Newsweek/The Daily Beast.[14] He was also a senior political writer for The Daily Beast. In 2012, Beinart was included on Foreign Policy magazine's list of 100 top global thinkers.[15]

On November 4, 2013, Haaretz announced that Beinart would be hired as a columnist beginning January 1, 2014.[16] The same day, the Atlantic Media Company said he would join National Journal and write for The Atlantic's website beginning in January. Beinart would cease operating his blog at The Daily Beast.[17] In January 2017 he left Haaretz and became a columnist for The Forward,[18] where he stayed until the beginning of 2020, when he joined Jewish Currents as an editor-at-large.[19]

In August 2018, Beinart said he was detained by Shin Bet at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport and questioned about his presence at West Bank protests and outspoken criticism of the Israeli government's policies toward the Palestinians. Beinart called his experience "trivial" when compared to the experiences of others, particularly Palestinians and Palestinian Americans who travel through Israel's main airport.[20][21] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Israeli security forces, was told that Beinart's detention was an administrative mistake, and that the country "welcomes all—critics and supporters alike."[22]

Beinart was the editor of The New Republic when the publication editorially supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq; Beinart was identified as one of the major forces behind the magazine's support for the war; his status as a liberal hawk who supported the Iraq War is cited as a primary cause of his rise.[23][24][25][26] In 2004, a New Republic editorial written during his editorial tenure assessed its support for the Iraq War thus: "We feel regret, but no shame. . . . Our strategic rationale for war has collapsed."[23] In 2010, Beinart said he was motivated to support the Iraq War by a concern that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons.[27]

Beinart is the author of the 2006 book The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. The book, which grew out of a 2004 article in The New Republic arguing that Democrats need to take the threat of Islamic totalitarianism more seriously, is a liberal defense of muscular interventionism abroad, particularly with a view to reforming various nations in the Middle East.[28]

Beinart's second book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (2010), "look[ed] back at the past hundred years of U.S. foreign policy in the baleful light of recent events [and found] the ground littered with ... the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence [as demonstrable in] a study of three needless wars", World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War.[12]

On October 24, 2017, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic from 1983 until his resignation in 2014, admitted to "offenses against some of my colleagues in the past" after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual advances. Beinart, who was the magazine's editor at the time of the harassment of the woman, subsequently said he had not done enough to stop the behavior and felt shame for not doing so.[29]

Beinart wrote that when he reported Wieseltier's harassment of Sarah Wildman, then an assistant editor of The New Republic, to Marty Peretz (who was then the magazine's owner and editor in chief) "and insisted that he come to Washington to tell Leon that such behavior was unacceptable", he was ignored. The sexual harassment only got worse. Beinart has since said that he was afraid if he pursued the matter further, he would be jeopardizing his own career. Peretz later told Wildman, "Peter never, ever, ever reported this to me".[29]

According to The New York Times: "Several women... said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters."[30]

Wildman later alleged that she was fired in retaliation for complaining: "In disclosing this incident to my superiors, the outcome was, in many ways, far worse than the act itself. It’s not exactly that I was disbelieved; it’s that in the end, I was dismissed", she wrote in Vox.[29]

Wildman wrote that the sexual harassment went hand in hand with gender discrimination at the magazine during Peretz's and Beinart's tenure: "The women knew we had a far shallower chance of rising up the masthead than our male counterparts; all of us hoped we’d be the exception. To do so, we entered into a game in which the rules were rigged against us, sometimes pushing us well past our point of comfort in order to remain in play."[29]

Peretz later claimed that he could recall nothing about the harassment. But Beinart later said and wrote that when he directly reported Wieseltier's harassment of Wildman to Peretz he was ignored, allowing the harassment to continue.[29]

In a formal statement Beinart made in response to Wildman's article, he wrote: "I was complicit in an institutional culture that lacked professional procedures regarding sexual harassment, and which victimized women, including women I considered friends. I will always be ashamed of that, and will ensure that I am never similarly complicit again." He did not address whether Wildman was fired in retaliation for complaining about her harassment.[29]

Peretz responded to Beinart's recollection of the two men specifically meeting to discuss the matter by saying: "Peter never, ever, ever reported this to me." He added, "I don't remember Sarah Wildman."[29]

As of 2012, Beinart lives in New York City.[11] He keeps kosher,[5] regularly attends an Orthodox synagogue, and sends his children to a Jewish school.[31]

• The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror. New York, New York: HarperCollins. 2006. ISBN 978-0-06-084161-4.
• The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. New York, New York: HarperCollins. 2010. ISBN 978-0-06-145646-6.
• Peter Beinart (June 10, 2010). "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment". The New York Review of Books.
• The Crisis of Zionism. New York, New York: Times Books. 2012. ISBN 978-0-8050-9412-1.

• Column archives at The Daily Beast
• "Zion Square. Open Zion website". The Daily Beast.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • C-SPAN Q&A interview with Beinart, April 3, 2005
• Peter Beinart on Charlie Rose
• Peter Beinart at IMDb
• Jeffrey Goldberg (May 18, 2010). "Goldblog vs. Peter Beinart. Interview with Peter Beinart Part I". The Atlantic.
  Jeffrey Goldberg (May 18, 2010). "Goldblog vs. Peter Beinart. Interview with Peter Beinart Part II". The Atlantic.
• The Special Kind Of Hate That Drove Pittsburgh Shooter — And Trump by Peter Beinart
• Shield of the Republic: A New Democratic Foreign Policy by Peter Beinart
• David Friedman. "Read Peter Beinart and you'll vote Donald Trump; His reflexive reaction to my involvement in the Trump candidacy lays bare how dangerous the Jewish left is to the State of Israel," Arutz Sheva (op-ed).