Peter Beinart

In August 2018, Beinart 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."

In a 2018 essay in The Atlantic, he wrote that Trump voters care more about murder by illegal immigrants than about the cover-up of the president'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. Beinart also attracted criticism for proposing that America secure peace in East Asia by allowing Mainland China to take control of Taiwan.

Beinart is the author of the book The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, published in 2006. Drawing upon the work of the mid-century 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.

Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz announced on November 4, 2013, 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.

In 2012, Beinart was included on Foreign Policy magazine's list of 100 top global thinkers.

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 historically linked 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.

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, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, published in 2010, "look[ed] back at the past hundred years of U.S. foreign policy in the baleful light of recent events [and found] the ground littered with ... the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence [as demonstrable in] a study of three needless wars", World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War.

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 Orthodox synagogue, and sends his children to a Jewish school.

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 Republic' s signature "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 Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at New America. He has written for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other periodicals. Occasionally Beinart has appeared on various TV news discussion programs. His achievements at a very young age have earned him the accolade "wunderkind". In March 2012 he launched a new blog, "Open Zion", at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. He was also a senior political writer for The Daily Beast.

Peter Alexander Beinart (/ˈ b aɪ n ər t / ; born 1971) is an American columnist, journalist, and liberal 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 associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York. He is a senior columnist at Haaretz. He also is a contributor to The Atlantic and National Journal, and programs on CNN.

Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971. His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa (his maternal grandfather was from Russia, and his maternal grandmother, who was Sephardic, was from Egypt). His father's parents were from Lithuania. His mother, Doreen (née Pienaar), is a former director of the Harvard's Human Rights film series at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and his father, Julian Beinart, is a former professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His stepfather is theatre critic and playwright Robert Brustein. Beinart attended Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge. He then studied history and political science at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union, and graduated in 1993. He was a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford University, where he earned an M.Phil. in international relations in 1995.