Jacob Rosenthal

Jacob “Jack” Rosenthal was born in Tel-Aviv, Palestine in 1935 and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He attended Harvard University, where he was an editor of The Harvard Crimson, and graduated with an A.B. degree in history in 1956. He worked as a reporter and editor at The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon and served in the U.S. Army. In 1961, Rosenthal went to Washington D.C. to serve in the U.S. Department of Justice as the Assistant Director of Public Information from 1961-1964, the Director of Public Information from 1964-1967, and in the U.S. State Department as the Executive Assistant to Under Secretary Nicholas deB. Katzenbach from 1966-1967. Rosenthal was a Kennedy Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics from 1967-1968, and in 1968 he was the principal editor of the Kerner Commission Report on urban riots. Rosenthal joined The New York Times as the urban correspondent in 1969, and in 1982 he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing on national politics and social policy. He served as The New York Times Editorial Page Editor from 1986-1993 and as the Magazine Editor from 1993-2000. Rosenthal was the President of The New York Times Company Foundation from 2000 – 2009 and a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Philanthropies.