About Michael Goldfarb
Michael Goldfarb is an author, journalist and broadcaster. Michael spent the first part of his career in his native New York working in the theatre. He moved to London in 1985 where he began working as a freelance journalist primarily covering theatre and film for the Guardian and the BBC. Via the BBC, he began to work more regularly as a broadcast journalist and eventually began filing features for NPR.
His big break as a journalist came on Thanksgiving Day 1990. He was baby-sitting NPR's London Bureau while the usual correspondent enjoyed a long weekend off and on that day British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dramatically resigned. Goldfarb filed continuously for 48 hours and discovered he was a hard news adrenaline junkie. For the next 15 years he covered conflicts and conflict resolution from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to Iraq.
At the beginning of 1999, Goldfarb left NPR and from 2000 through mid 2005, he made documentaries for the public radio program Inside Out. One of these, Ahmad's War: Inside Out, became the basis for his first book, Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005. Reporting another documentary, British Jihad: Inside Out, provided the inspiration for his new book, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.
His work has been given the highest honors on both sides of the Atlantic including the DuPont-Columbia Award and Overseas Press Club's Lowell Thomas Award in America and the Sony Gold award in Britain. He has also been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Michael Goldfarb continues to balance a three-part career writing books, doing radio work for the BBC and daily journalism for Globalpost.com
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Latest Book
Emancipation
How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance
For almost 500 years the Jews of Europe were kept apart, confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside. Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution, the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had begun. What happened next would change the course of history.
"A beautifully written masterwork."
Vartan Gregorian,
Preisident Carnegie Corporation
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