Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma (born 28 December 1951) is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the United States. In 2017, he became editor of The New York Review of Books, but left the position in September 2018.

Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan. He is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College.

Early life and education Buruma was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands. His father, Sytze Leonard "Leo" Buruma, was a Dutch lawyer and son of a Mennonite minister; his mother, Gwendolyn Margaret "Wendy" Schlesinger, was a Briton of German-Jewish descent. He went to study at Leiden University in 1971, and obtained a Candidate degree in Chinese literature and history in 1975. He subsequently pursued postgraduate studies in Japanese cinema from 1975 to 1977 at the College of Art (Nichidai Geijutsu Gakko) of the Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan.

Career Overview Buruma worked as a film reviewer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker in Japan between 1975 and 1981. During the 1980s, he edited the cultural section of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. He later traveled throughout Asia working as a freelance writer. In 1991, he was foreign editor of The Spectator in London. Buruma has contributed numerous articles to The New York Review of Books since 1985 and has written for The Guardian. He held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1991) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. (1999), and he was an Alistair Horne fellow of St Antony's College in Oxford, United Kingdom. In 2000, he delivered the Huizinga Lecture (on "Neoromanticism of writers in exile") in the Pieterskerk in Leiden, Netherlands.

From 2003 to 2018, Buruma was Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in New York. In 2018, he became editor of The New York Review of Books (NYRB), succeeding founding editor Robert B. Silvers.

He has been a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2001.

New York Review of Books controversy In September 2019, Buruma left the NYRB position following a dispute about his publication of an essay by Canadian talk show host Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi was acquitted in 2016 of one count of choking and four counts of sexual assault after over 20 women complained either to the police or in the media. The publication of the essay was controversial, in part, because Ghomeshi wrote that the allegations against him were "inaccurate". In an interview with Slate magazine, Buruma defended his decision to publish the article. His stated reason was to spark a discussion about non legal punishment by public opinion; how should a person who has been acquitted in a court of law be punished? Buruma denied that the article was misleading because it had failed to mention that Ghomeshi had been required to issue an apology to one of the victims as part of the terms of a case against him, in which he was acquitted. He also denied that the title, "Reflections from a Hashtag", was dismissive of the #MeToo movement; stated that the movement has resulted in "undesirable consequences"; and said: "I'm no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation... The exact nature of [Ghomeshi's] behavior – how much consent was involved – I have no idea, nor is it really my concern."

In response to outrage over his defense of the article, the Review leadership later stated that it had departed from its "usual editorial practices" as the essay "was shown to only one male editor during the editing process", a statement Buruma denies, since he has maintained that many more editors were involved, and that Buruma's statement to Slate about the staff of the Review "did not accurately represent their views". More than 100 contributors to the Review, including Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan, signed a letter of protest to express fears that Buruma's exit threatened intellectual culture and "the free exploration of ideas".

Awards In 2004, Buruma was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (Dr.h.c.) in Theology from the University of Groningen.

In 2008, Buruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe". He was included in Foreign Policy magazine's 2010 list of the "100 top global thinkers".

Buruma has won several prizes for his books, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Theater of Cruelty. Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, with whom he published a series of interviews in book form.

He argued in 2001 for wholehearted British participation in the European Union because they were the "strongest champions in Europe of a liberal approach to commerce and politics".