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Media|Richard Bernstein Dies at 80; Times Correspondent, Critic and Author
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/business/media/richard-bernstein-dead.html
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He wrote from Europe and Asia, served as a book critic and produced a raft of books, on subjects ranging from the French condition to multiculturalism.
By Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen and Richard Bernstein were Times colleagues for decades.
April 2, 2025, 5:54 p.m. ET
Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for The New York Times whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminated reporting from Tiananmen Square to the Bastille, and who wrote things as he saw them in 10 books driven by unflinching intellectual curiosity, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by pancreatic cancer, diagnosed less than eight weeks ago, his son, Elias Bernstein, said. Mr. Bernstein lived in Brooklyn.
Over more than two decades at The Times, Mr. Bernstein brought deep historical knowledge, a gracious writing style and a stubborn contrarian streak to subjects as various as the meaning of the French Revolution, the nature of Chinese authoritarianism, the “multitudinous strands” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, and the significance of parentheses in the politics of academic language.
Writing about the Danube in 2003 after a 1,750-mile journey along it, Mr. Bernstein observed: “Rivers are symbols. You can not think of the Mississippi without also thinking of the American drama of race. The Seine is Parisian elegance; the Rhine, German national identity. The Yellow River is China immemorial.”
As for the water on which he glided from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, it was “the river of exquisite stricken cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire,” the “Blue Danube Waltz” of Johann Strauss, the Holocaust and “the clanging into place of the Iron Curtain.”
His journalism had sweep, an elegiac sense of the tragic inherent in human affairs, and often a subtly crafted argumentation rooted in thorough on-the-ground reporting. Mr. Bernstein, who retained throughout his life something of the nervousness and capacity for wonder of a cub reporter, never tired of working hard.
