Bret Louis Stephens, born November 21, 1973, in New York City and raised in Mexico City, is an American conservative journalist, columnist, and pundit. He studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. Stephens began his career as an assistant editor at Commentary magazine from 1995 to 1996. In 1998, he joined The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed editor, later working as an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. He served as a foreign affairs columnist for the Journal for 11 years and as deputy editorial page editor. In 2017, Stephens joined The New York Times as a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist and became a senior contributor to NBC News. He is known for his conservative, pro-Israel, and hawkish foreign policy views, and is a prominent critic of campus antisemitism and of nationalist and populist movements within conservatism, including adversarial exchanges with figures like Yoram Hazony. Since 2021, he has been the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.