Herman Bernstein - Journalism

Journalism

Bernstein was prolific as a journalist throughout his life, with his first stories published in 1900. He contributed, among others, to the New York Evening Post, The Nation, The Independent, and Ainslee's Magazine. He was the founder and editor of The New London Day and an editor of the The Jewish Tribune and of the Jewish Daily Bulletin. As a correspondent of the New York Times, Bernstein regularly travelled to Europe. In 1915, he went to Europe to document the situation of Jews in the war zones.

Bernstein covered the Russian Revolution in 1917 for the New York Herald, which led him to both Siberia and Japan with the American Expeditionary Forces. He covered the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 for the same newspaper.

Victoria Woeste writes:

Bernstein, a novelist and poet of some repute, won acclaim for his accomplishments in investigative journalsim in the 1910s. He was driven 'to lay bare the operations of Russian totalitarianism, whether Czarist or Bolshevist, especially in so far as it affected the fate of Russian Jews.' His reporting revealed 'the involvement of the Russian secret police in the case of Mendel Beilis, the Jew wrongfully accused of the ritual murder of a gentile boy' in 1911, and he also documented social and political conditions in Russia before and after the Communist Revolution.

Bernstein later translated Beilis's Story of My Sufferings (see translations, below). In the 1920s Bernstein wrote for the New York American and the Brooklyn Eagle, often reporting from Europe and writing frequently about Russia.