Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent and critic for The New York Instances whose deep data of Asia and Europe illuminated reporting from Tiananmen Sq. to the Bastille, and who wrote issues as he noticed them in 10 books pushed by unflinching mental curiosity, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.
His dying, in a hospital, was brought on by pancreatic most cancers, recognized lower than eight weeks in the past, his son, Elias Bernstein, stated. Mr. Bernstein lived in Brooklyn.
Over greater than twenty years at The Instances, Mr. Bernstein introduced deep historic data, a gracious writing type and a cussed contrarian streak to topics as varied because the that means of the French Revolution, the character of Chinese language authoritarianism, the “multitudinous strands” within the 1993 World Commerce Middle bombing trial, and the importance of parentheses within the politics of educational language.
Writing in regards to the Danube in 2003 after a 1,750-mile journey alongside it, Mr. Bernstein observed: “Rivers are symbols. You cannot consider the Mississippi with out additionally pondering of the American drama of race. The Seine is Parisian magnificence; the Rhine, German nationwide id. 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 beautiful stricken cities of the previous 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 infrequently a subtly crafted argumentation rooted in thorough on-the-ground reporting. Mr. Bernstein, who retained all through his life one thing of the nervousness and capability for marvel of a cub reporter, by no means uninterested in working onerous.
“I frankly don’t like books that begin from the premise that issues are too complicated to permit for any generalizations,” he wrote in “Fragile Glory,” his wealthy 1990 portrait of France, a rustic “someplace halfway between a sure persistent dream and an immovable actuality.” It was a nation, for Mr. Bernstein, that sought to “glow with the torch of civilization itself” even because it writhed over its “army and ethical collapse within the face of the Nazis.”
If cleareyed on the ineluctability of struggling, Mr. Bernstein was additionally an optimist. The primary-generation son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Belarus, he grew up on a hen farm in rural Connecticut, the place he discovered to type small, medium, massive, additional massive and jumbo eggs and was schooled in scrappy battle.
Garments have been hand-me-downs; Hanukkah items, modest. The household rule was corn within the backyard couldn’t be picked till the water was boiling. At age 9, seated on his father’s lap, he would drive the farm pickup truck to gather eggs on the hen coops.
From that have he took a distaste for posturing, a suspicion of style, an impatience with taboos and a deep perception in American chance. He believed in a good shake for everybody, together with his journalistic topics. In his view, it was to America, as a postwar energy in Asia and Europe, that fell the accountability to safeguard and lengthen the liberty from which his household had benefited.
“A Jewish mental from a hen farm, he by no means swerved from his attachment to what America ought to stand for,” the writer Kati Marton stated in an interview.
In a dispatch from Beijing, the place he had been despatched to report quickly after the bloodbath of protesting college students on the evening of June 3-4, 1989, Mr. Bernstein quoted a saying utilized in Imperial China to steer folks to tell on traitors: “For the sake of the good trigger, destroy your family members.”
He pivoted, with the peace of mind of a China scholar, to ask whether or not, on this gentle, the Chinese language Folks’s Liberation Military’s brutal slaying of lots of of scholars was “a product of Twentieth-century totalitarianism” or reflective of the nation’s lengthy custom of harsh autocratic rule. As typically with Mr. Bernstein, it was an try to succeed in past the information to the deeper historic currents of occasions.
His conclusion was that there was one thing new and singular within the authorities’s bald denial of what had occurred and in its “solely fashionable marketing campaign of incessant propaganda” in opposition to the “thugs,” as the federal government referred to as its victims.
“The notion right here is that any opposition to the Authorities is not only incorrect,” he wrote. “It’s felony, treasonous, counterrevolutionary, and those that led it deserve neither respect nor humane therapy.”
A Democrat of generally conservative views, Mr. Bernstein grappled with America’s ideological drift lengthy earlier than cancel tradition, gender-norm wars and the present indignant fracture of the nation over variety, fairness and inclusion insurance policies.
In a gently mocking “On Language” column in The New York Instances Journal from 1990, he wrote of a tutorial convention he had attended that was marketed as “Rewriting the (Submit)fashionable and (Submit)colonialism,” and noticed that the parentheses have been a manner of constructing readers assume once more about meanings “all the time taken as a right.”
“The parentheses have been positioned not solely round phrases but in addition round elements of phrases,” he wrote. “There was one paper titled ‘Finding Un(re)presentable Need: Narrational Transformations and Postmodern Man.’ One other was ‘It’s Not (Submit) Till it’s Submit(ed): (Submit)modernism and the Terminological Endgames of Terrorism.’”
Drawing from that convention, he went on to notice that “our primary values” have been now generally referred to as “the dominant discourse,” and even “the totalizing discourse,” whose reputed ravages have been most felt by “these exterior the ability construction.”
Hooked up to these more and more contested primary American values, if conscious of their must evolve, he gave expression to his considerations in “Dictatorship of Advantage: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future,” revealed in 1994. In that ebook, he argued that makes an attempt to advertise variety had typically stifled variety, and thru reporting throughout American boardrooms and lecture rooms, he chronicled what he noticed as a treacherous, feel-good undermining of the nation’s meritocratic, can-do imaginative and prescient.
It was a ebook that received Mr. Bernstein extra enemies than mates even because it presaged ideological fissures destined to develop. He by no means shrank from troublesome topics: In 2009, he revealed “The East, the West, and Intercourse: A Historical past,” an exploration of the connection between intercourse and energy advised via the encounters of Western explorers, retailers and conquerors with Japanese cultures.
“He believed in fact, irrespective of the place the chips fell,” stated David Margolick, a journalist and writer. “No person had handed him something. His integrity was absolute. He wrote what he thought with out wanting over his shoulder.”
Richard Paul Bernstein was born in New York on Could 5, 1944, the primary of two youngsters of Herbert and Clare (Brown) Bernstein. The household moved quickly after to a poultry farm in East Haddam, Conn., after the Jewish Agricultural Society, a company established to offer farm coaching to Japanese European immigrants, gave his father a mortgage.
Richard attended an Orthodox synagogue — “a rickety previous constructing cantilevered over a gully close to the soda store,” within the phrases of his lifelong pal Donald Berwick — and graduated from Nathan Hale-Ray Excessive College in close by Moodus, earlier than attending the College of Connecticut, the place he earned a B.A. in historical past.
Wanderlust already had a grip on him. He went on to earn an M.A. at Harvard College in historical past and East Asian languages, a course chosen partly as a result of it provided the opportunity of transferring to Taiwan to review Mandarin. There was born a ardour for Asia that by no means left him. It led to jobs as a stringer and later correspondent in Beijing for Time journal earlier than he joined The Instances in 1982, initially as a reporter protecting metropolitan New York.
Mr. Bernstein later served as United Nations bureau chief, Paris bureau chief, nationwide cultural correspondent, ebook critic and Berlin bureau chief earlier than leaving The Instances in 2006.
Judy Peritz, his youthful sister, recalled how their father had given him a BB gun when he was 11. He would shoot at birds, and sooner or later he hit one, and was appalled to see how the fowl struggled and suffered from what he had performed. “He by no means used the gun once more,” she stated.
A deep kindness accompanied Mr. Bernstein to the tip. Though not non secular, he joined a Torah research group late in life, intent on exploring the that means of his Jewishness.
Along with his son and sister, Mr. Bernstein is survived by his spouse, Zhongmei Li, a famend Chinese language classical dancer and choreographer.
“Everyone knows dying comes,” he advised Ms. Peritz simply earlier than he died. “I’d have liked to have extra, however now perceive that I received’t. I settle for that and am not afraid. I’ve lived a very great and fascinating life.”
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