Peter Alexander Beinart is an American columnist, journalist, and political commentator. A former editor of The New Republic, he has written for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books among other periodicals, and is the author of three books. He is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is an editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, a contributor to The Atlantic, and a political commentator for CNN.
Beinart worked at The New Republic as the managing editor from 1995 to 1997, then as senior editor till 1999, and as the magazine's editor from 1999 to 2006. For much of that time he also wrote The New Republics "TRB" column, which was reprinted in the New York Post and other newspapers. From 2007 till 2009 he was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Beinart is a 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. Beinart has appeared on various TV news discussion programs, and is a political commentator for CNN. His editor-in-chief at the Forward called him a "wunderkind". In March 2012, Beinart launched a new blog, "Open Zion", at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. 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. On November 4, 2013, Haaretz announced that Beinart would be hired as a columnist beginning January 1, 2014. 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. At the beginning of 2020, Beinart left Haaretz and joined Jewish Currents as an editor-at-large. 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. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Israeli security forces and was told that Beinart's detention was an administrative mistake, and that the country "welcomes all—critics and supporters alike."
Works and views
Beinart is the author of the 2006 book The Good Fight. Drawing upon the work of the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Beinart argues that, paradoxically, the only way for America to distinguish itself from the predatory imperial powers of the past is to acknowledge its own capacity for evil. Beinart was a vocal supporter of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but by 2006, as he published his first book, he "had concluded that it had been a tragic mistake". His second book, , published in 2010, "look back at the past hundred years of U.S. foreign policy in the baleful light of recent events the ground littered with... the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence a study of three needless wars", World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. In his 2010 essay "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in the New York Review of Books, Beinart argued that the tensions between liberalism and Zionism in the U.S. may tear the two concepts apart. He argued that by abetting Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, American Jewish leaders risk alienating generations of younger American Jews who find the occupation morally wrong and incompatible with their liberal politics. He expanded on this argument in his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism. In 2016 Beinart said that greater military engagement against ISIS could be detrimental to America. In a 2018 essay in The Atlantic, Beinart wrote that Trump voters care more about murder by illegal immigrants than about the cover-up of the Trump's affairs. He also wrote in 2018 that there is rising authoritarian nationalism in many countries with diverse situations. The conditions include both booming and poor economies, with only some concerned about immigration. He said the true common thread among right-wing autocrats is both a hostility to liberal democracy and the desire to subordinate women. In a 2020 essay, Beinart repudiated his former belief in the two-state solution, and in an explanatory essay in Jewish Currents, he argued that the two-state model might have become untenable and that its practical eventual outcome would be the wholesale removal of Palestinians from the territory currently occupied by Israel and Palestine. Israel and Palestine, Beinart wrote, should instead work toward creating a fully democratic binational state representing both Jewish and Palestinian identity. Beinart followed this essay with a shorter opinion piece for the New York Times, "." Subsequent commentary in the media ranged from outright praise of the essay to allegations of dishonesty: author Daniel Gordis wrote, “Beinart strings together an astonishing array of sleights of hand and misrepresentations... little more than a screed that is an insult to the intelligence of his readers."
Personal life
Since 2003, Beinart has been married to Diana Robin Hartstein, a lawyer. They live with their two children in New York City. He keeps kosher, regularly attends an Orthodoxsynagogue, and sends his children to a Jewish school.
