Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic of the New York Times, whose deep knowledge of Asia and Europe illuminated the report from Tiananmen Square to Bastille, wrote things in ten books driven by the intellectual curiosity of tweets that died Monday in Manhattan. He was 80 years old.
His death in the hospital was caused by pancreatic cancer, diagnosed eight weeks ago, his son Elias Bernstein said. Mr. Bernstein lived in Brooklyn.
Over the course of more than 20 years with The Times, Bernstein has brought deep historical knowledge, elegant writing style, and a stubborn reverse streak to a variety of subjects, as diverse as the meaning of the French Revolution, the nature of Chinese authoritarianism, the “multipurpose chain” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the importance of parenting in academic politics.
After a 1,750-mile journey along that waterway, writing about the Danube in 2003, Bernstein said: “The river is a symbol. You can't think of Mississippi without even considering American racial drama. The Seine is the elegance of Paris.
As for the water that he slid from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, it was “the river of the exquisitely attacked city of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire”, Johann Strauss's “Blue Danube Waltz”, the Holocaust, “the dense cluster in the location of iron curtains”.
His journalism had a tragic sense inherent in human circumstances, and subtly crafted debate rooted in thorough earthly reports. Having held something of tension and the mysterious abilities of the Cub Reporter throughout his life, Bernstein never tires of working hard.
“I honestly don't like books that start with books that are too complicated to allow generalization,” he writes in “Fragile Glory.” For Bernstein, it was a nation that “shining with the torch of civilization itself” even if it were caught up in “the military and moral collapse in the face of the Nazis.”
When it came to clarity about the inexplicability of suffering, Bernstein was also an optimist. The first generation son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Belarus, he grew up on a rural farm in Connecticut, where he learned to sort small, medium, large, large, jumbo eggs. He was in school in a crude struggle.
Her clothes were lying in her hand. Hanukkah gift, modest. The family rule was that corn in the garden could not be chosen until the water boiled. At the age of nine, sitting on his father's lap, he drove a farm pickup truck to collect eggs in a chicken coop.
From that experience he took a dislike of attitude, a doubt about fashion, an impatience with taboos, and a deep belief in America's potential. He believed in a fair shaking for everyone, including his journalistic themes. In his view, it was against America as a postwar power in Asia and Europe, and was responsible for protecting and expanding the freedoms his family had benefited.
“A bee farm Jewish intellectual, he never wavered from his attachment to what America should support,” author Katy Merton said in an interview.
On a dispatch from Beijing sent to report shortly after the massacre of students protesting on the night of June 3-4, 1989, Bernstein cited a proverb used in the Chinese Empire.
He circumcised with the assurance of Chinese scholars, from this point of view, he circulated to ask whether the brutal killings of hundreds of students of the People's Liberation Army were “a product of 20th century totalitarianism” or reflect the long traditions of a country of strict dictatorship. Like Bernstein frequently, it was an attempt to go beyond the news and reach a deeper historical current of events.
His conclusion was that, as the government called the victims, there was something new in the government's bald denial of what happened in the “completely modern propaganda” of “completely modern propaganda” against “hard crimes” against “hard crimes.”
“The concept here is that opposition to government is not just wrong,” he wrote. “It was criminal, rebellious, counter-revolutionary, and the people who led it were worthless either respectful or humane.”
A sometimes conservative Democrat, Bernstein worked on the drift of American ideology long before cancelling the culture, gender gnome war, and the country's current rage fractures over diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Gently chuckle the 1990 New York Times column “in language” and he wrote about the Science Council, which was touted as “rewrites (post)modern and (post)colonialism,” and observed that parentheses were a way of making readers think again about the meaning of “always thinking the obvious meaning.”
“The parentheses were placed not only around words, but also around some of the words,” he writes. There was one paper entitled “Finding the Desire that Could Find a Place for the United Nations: Narrational Transformation and Postmodern Man.” The other was “Post (ed): (post) not until the end game of modernism and terrorism terms.” ”
Drawn from that meeting, he noted that “our fundamental values” were now commonly referred to as “dominant discourses,” or even “total discourses.”
Knowing the need to evolve, accompanied by increasingly contested basic American values, he gave his expression to his concerns in Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for the American Future, published in 1994. A meritocratic vision of what to do.
It was a book that gained more enemies than friends, even if you booked a crack in the ideological growth of fate. He never shrunk from the difficult subject. In 2009 he published “East, West, Gender: History.”
“He believed in the truth no matter where the chips fell,” said journalist and author David Margolick. “No one handed him anything. His integrity was absolute. He wrote what he thought without looking over his shoulder.”
Richard Paul Bernstein was born in New York on May 5, 1944, the first of two children, Herbert and Claire (Brown) Bernstein. The family quickly moved to a poultry farm in East Hadham, Connecticut. This was after the Jewish Agricultural Association, which was established to provide agricultural training to migrants in Eastern Europe, gave his father a loan;
Richard, in the words of his lifelong friend Donald Berwick, attended an orthodox synagogue – “The Galakaname Building on Gully Near Soda Shop,” and attended the University of Connecticut after graduating from nearby Nathan Hale Ray High School in Moodus.
The wanderlust was already holding onto him. He continued to win an MA at Harvard University in History and East Asian Languages. This is a course chosen because it provided the possibility of moving to Taiwan to study Mandarin. He didn't leave because his passion for Asia was born. Before joining the Times in 1982, he initially took up a stringer job as a reporter covering Metropolitan New York, before becoming a correspondent for Time Magazine's Beijing.
Before leaving the Times in 2006, Bernstein served as Director of the United Nations, Director of Paris, National Culture Correspondent, Director of the Celebrity, and Director of Berlin.
His sister, Judy Peritz, recalled how her father gave him a BB gun when he was 11 years old. He shot a bird, and one day he hit it and was applauded to see the bird suffering and suffering what he had done. “He's never used a gun again,” she said.
His deep kindness accompanied Mr. Bernstein until the very end. Although not religious, he joins the Torah Studies Group later in his life, with the aim of exploring his Jewish meaning.
In addition to his son and sister, Mr. Bernstein was survived by his wife Zhongmei Li, a famous classic Chinese dancer and choreographer.
“We all know that death is coming,” he told Peritz just before he died. “I would have loved to have more, but now I understand that I won't. I accept that and I'm not afraid. I have a really wonderful and interesting life.”
