Bret Louis Stephens (born November 21, 1973) is an American conservative journalist, editor, and columnist. 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 previously a foreign affairs columnist and deputy editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal, overseeing the editorial pages of its European and Asian editions. At the Wall Street Journal, Stephens won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2013.
From 2002 to 2004, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.
Stephens is known for his neoconservative foreign policy opinions and for being part of the right-of-center opposition to Donald Trump.
Biography
Stephens was born in New York City, the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico. 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. 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). Louis Stephens moved to Mexico City, where he founded General Products and built his fortune. 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. Bret was raised there and is fluent in Spanish. As a teenager, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.
Stephens earned an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He then earned a master's degree in comparative politics 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. He was previously married to Pamela Paul, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review.
Journalism career
Stephens began his career as an assistant editor at Commentary magazine in 1995–96.
In 1998 he joined The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed editor. He later worked as an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, in Brussels. Stephens edited the weekly "State of the Union" column on the European Union.
In 2002, Stephens moved to Israel to become the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. 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. 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. "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." 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.
Stephens left The Jerusalem Post in 2004 and returned to The Wall Street Journal. In 2006, he took over the Journals "Global View" column.
In 2017, Stephens left the Journal, joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist, and began appearing as an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.
In 2021, Stephens became editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations, published by Maimonides Fund.
Awards and recognition
In 2005, the World Economic Forum named Stephens a Young Global Leader. He won the 2008 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. In 2009, he was named deputy editorial page editor after Melanie Kirkpatrick's retirement. In 2010, Stephens won the Reason Foundation's Bastiat Prize.
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." He is a national judge of the Livingston Award. In 2015, Stephens joined the Real-Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences. The Real-Time Academy judges contestants for the Shorty Awards, which honor the best individuals and organizations on social media.