Key Facts
Career & Education
About
Jacob Heilbrunn is an American journalist, author, and editor based in Washington, DC. He earned a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.A. from Georgetown University. Early in his career, he was a member of College Republicans and began as an assistant editor at The National Interest, where his first issue featured Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History?' essay. He has served as editor of The National Interest since July 2013 and in leadership at the Center for the National Interest. Previously, he was a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic, advanced to senior editor at The New Republic, and served as an editorial writer and board member at the Los Angeles Times. Heilbrunn contributes to prominent outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, Weekly Standard, and German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. He held fellowships as Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Berlin (1994) and Japan Society Fellow in Tokyo studying Japanese nationalism (1996), and received the George F. Kennan Award for commentary on German-American relations (2007). Heilbrunn authored 'They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons' (2008), named one of the New York Times' 100 notable books of the year. He serves as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2008, political scientist Corey Robin accused Heilbrunn of plagiarism in the book, alleging unattributed reproduction of passages from Robin's London Review of Books article, Patricia Derian's 1981 Nation piece on Reagan's human rights policy, and Simon Hall's 2003 Journal of American Studies article on the 1967 National Conference for New Politics, including specific quotes and structure; no public response or resolution from Heilbrunn is documented.
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