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.
Also recorded as I. Buruma
Ian Buruma
Merlijndoomernik · CC0
- Born
- 1951.
- Nationality
- Kingdom of the Netherlands.
- Occupation
- journalist, writer, historian, university teacher, columnist, non-fiction writer and photographer.
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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.
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In this article
Early life and education
Early life and education
He is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College.
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.
Overview
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.
Personal life and views
Personal life and views
Buruma has been married twice. He and his first wife, Sumie Tani, had a daughter, as did he and his second wife, Eri Hotta. 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".
Author Ian Buruma at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, United States.
Larry D. Moore
A conversation between Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on "Monsters" at the 2007 New Yorker Festival. Martin Amis and Ian Buruma on "Monsters"
Zuglói Lány · Flickr
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.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Bard Faculty: Ian Buruma. Bard College.
- 2.Grimes, William. Bumping Into Boundaries in a Land of Tolerance (book review. New York Times. September 13, 2006.
- 3.Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War Jewish Book Council. www.jewishbookcouncil.org. 2016.
- 4.Ian Buruma Critical Essays - eNotes.com. eNotes.
- 5.Peter Collier. , World Affairs Journal
- 6.Ian Buruma. The Guardian.
- 7.Schuessler, Jennifer. "Ian Buruma Named Editor of The New York Review of Books", The New York Times, May 18, 2017.
- 8."Contents: Contributors", New York Review of Books, August 17, 2017, Vol. 64, No. 13.
- 9.Ian Buruma. Project Syndicate.
- 10.Ghomeshi, Jian. Reflections from a Hashtag. The New York Review of Books. October 11, 2018.
- 11.Chotiner, Isaac. "Why Did the New York Review of Books Publish That Jian Ghomeshi Essay?", Slate, September 14, 2018.
- 12.Pilkington, Ed. "New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma departs amid outrage over essay", The Guardian, September 19, 2018.
- 13.Vanderhoof, Erin. "How Ian Buruma's New York Review of Books Ouster Became Inevitable", Vanity Fair, September 19, 2018
- 14.O'Rourke, Meghan. "What Magazines Can't Do in the Age of #MeToo", The Atlantic, September 21, 2018.
- 15.Williams, John. "New York Review of Books Acknowledges 'Failures' in a #MeToo Essay", The New York Times, September 24, 2018.
- 16.Laura Kipnis, "The Perils of Publishing in a #MeToo Moment", The New York Times, September 25, 2018. Retrieved November 26, 2018.
- 17.David Taylor, "How one article capsized a New York literary institution", The Guardian, September 26, 2018. Retrieved November 26, 2018.
- 18.Ed Pilkington, "Acclaimed authors pen letter in protest at 'forced resignation' of Ian Buruma", The Guardian, September 26, 2018. Retrieved November 26, 2018.
- 19.Conor Friedersdorf "The Journalistic Implications of Ian Buruma's Resignation", The Atlantic, September 25, 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2019.
- 20.A Letter from Contributors. 2018-10-25. 0028-7504.
- 21.Former Laureates: Ian Buruma, 2008. Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.
- 22."The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers", Foreign Policy, 29 November 2010.
- 23.A new cosmopolitan. The Jerusalem Post. 26 February 2009. 0792-822X.
- 24.Objective subjects. South China Morning Post. 3 May 2009.
- 25.Random House. Conversations with John Schlesinger.
- 26.In praise of Englishness. The Economist. October 23, 2001.
- 27.Title in the online table of contents is "Why 'The Tale of Genji' Is Still Seductive".
- 28.Online version is titled "Are China and the United States Headed for War?".
- 29.The Churchill Complex - Ian Buruma - 9781786494658. www.allenandunwin.com.
- 30.Online version is titled "What the Tokyo Trial Reveals about Empire, Memory, and Judgment".
Bibliography printed in the source article · 35
- Weatherhill. The Japanese Tattoo. 1980 <!--. 978-0834801493-->.
- Buruma, Ian. Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters, and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes. New American Library <!--. 1983. 978-0-452-01054-3-->.
- Jonathan Cape. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. 1984. 978-0-224-02049-7.
- Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986) with James Brandon, Kenneth Frampton, Martin Friedman, Donald Richie
- God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey (1989)
- Great Cities of the World: Hong Kong (1991)
- Playing the Game (1991) novel
- The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and in Japan (1994)
- Introduction for Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art (1998) by Jodi Cobb
- Voltaire's Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe (UK title) (1998) or Anglomania: A European Love Affair (US title) (1998)
- The Pilgrimage from Tiananmen Square, The New York Times (1999)
- The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West (2000) compilation
- De neo-romantiek van schrijvers in exil ("Neoromanticism of writers in exile") (2000)
- Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001)
- Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853–1964 (2003)
- Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004) with Avishai Margalit
- Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006) winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book.
- Conversations with John Schlesinger (2006)
- Commentary on the History of China for the time period of The Last Emperor, The Criterion Collection 2008 DVDs (ASIN: B000ZM1MIW, ).
- The China Lover (2008) novel
- China's class ceiling, published in the Los Angeles Times
- Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010) , with some historical examples of the value the separation of religion and national governance with the separation of church and state as one example.
- Grenzen aan de vrijheid: van De Sade tot Wilders (Limits to Freedom: From De Sade to Wilders) (2010) – Essay for the Month of Philosophy in the Netherlands.
- The Penguin Press. Year Zero: A History of 1945. 2013. 978-1-59420-436-4.
- "The Man Who Got It Right", The New York Review of Books (2013)
- Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War (2014)
- Buruma, Ian. The Sensualist: What Makes 'The Tale of Genji' So Seductive. The New Yorker. 91. 20. 64–71. July 20, 2015.
- Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War (2016)
- Buruma, Ian. Dance with the Dragon: Are the United States and China on a Collision Course?. The New Yorker. 93. 17. 61–66. June 19, 2017.
- The Penguin Press. A Tokyo Romance. 2018. 978-1-101-98141-2.
- Atlantic Books. The Churchill Complex - Ian Buruma - 9781786494658. www.allenandunwin.com. 2020. 978-1-78649-465-8 Cite web.
- The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II, Penguin Random House, 2023.
- Buruma, Ian. The Verdict. The New Yorker. 71–76. October 16, 2023.
- Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah, Yale University Press, 2024.
- Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945, Penguin Press, 2026.
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The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
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