Dan Kurzman


Daniel Halperin Kurzman, was an American journalist and writer of military history books. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley, served U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, and completed his studies at Berkeley with a Bachelor's degree in political science. At the end of his life Dan Kurzman lived in North Bergen with his wife Florence. He died December 12, 2010 at the age of 88, in Manhattan. His wife died the previous year.

Career

In the early 1950s, Kurzman worked in Europe and in Israel for American newspapers and news agencies, thereafter becoming correspondent of the NBC News in Jerusalem. In 1960 he published his first political book, a biography of the Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. In the 1960s, Kurzman worked as a foreign policy correspondent for the Washington Post. In 1965 he received the George Polk Award for external reporting.
He left the Washington Post and focused on researching and writing Modern History, especially military history non-fiction. In 1980 he received the Cornelius Ryan Award. A Polish-Israeli research team have suggested that much of what Kurzman wrote about the Warsaw Ghetto was actually tainted by the personal testimony of unreliable Polish witnesses most notably Henryk Iwanski, who deliberately magnified their own role in wartime Warsaw. Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum suggest that Kurzman accepted the account of Iwanski who presented himself as hero, uncritically, and that Iwanski's testimony should be treated as confabulation.

Works