艾德温·布莱克

Edwin Black (born February 27, 1950) is an American historian and author, as well as a syndicated columnist, investigative journalist, and weekly talk show host on The Edwin Black Show. He specializes in human rights, the historical interplay between economics and politics in the Middle East, petroleum policy, academic fraud, corporate criminality and abuse, and the financial underpinnings of Nazi Germany.

Biography

Early years

Black is the son of Holocaust survivors from Poland. His mother, Ethel "Edjya" Katz, from Białystok, told of narrowly escaping death during the Holocaust by escaping a boxcar en route to the Treblinka extermination camp as a 13-year old in August 1943. After escaping, she was shot by militiamen and then rescued by a Polish Jewish fighter whom she later married. Black's father described escaping death by fleeing to the woods from a long march to an isolated "shooting pit" and subsequently fighting the Nazis as a Betar partisan. The pair survived World War II by hiding in the forests of Poland for two years, emerging only after the end of the conflict and emigrating to the United States.

Of his own origins, Black has written: "I was born in Chicago, raised in Jewish neighborhoods, and my parents never tried to speak of their experience again." In his book The Transfer Agreement, Black notes that following in the beliefs of his parents, he was from his earliest days a supporter of the State of Israel. As a young man he spent time on a kibbutz, visited Israel on several other occasions, and gave earnest consideration to permanent residency there.

Career

Black started working as a professional journalist while still in high school, later attending university where he further developed the craft. He also was a frequent freelance contributor to the four major Chicago newspapers of the day, the Tribune, the Daily News, the Sun-Times, and Chicago Today, as well as such weeklies as Chicago Reader and Chicago Magazine. In the late 1970s, he was the editor of Chicago Monthly.

One of Black's first forays into investigative journalism began in 1970 with a commission from Atlantic Monthly. He was tasked with finding out about an alleged plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963. For Black it was a long and difficult assignment that finally resulted in his November 1975 article in Chicago Independent magazine. He noted in the article how he became the subject of government harassment. His apartment was broken into and his files "were obviously and clumsily searched." He described his many months of scrutinizing documents, following hundreds of leads, and conducting dozens of interviews. But he wrote that his main source of information was a Secret Service agent on duty at the time of the events in Chicago. Although Black did not name this agent, it is strongly believed to have been Secret Service whistleblower Abraham Bolden.

In 1978, Black interviewed the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented members of the American Nazi Party, which had marched provocatively through the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie. In preparing himself for that interview, Black's interest was piqued by the hidden history of relations between the government of Adolf Hitler and German-Jewish Zionists during the initial years of the Nazi regime. Five years of research followed, ending in the 1984 publication of his first book, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.

In the early 1990s, Black served as the editor-in-chief for OS/2 Professional magazine and OS/2 Week, and reported on OS/2 users and technology. Black's books have typically made use of networks of volunteer and professional researchers assembled for each project. Three years before completion of his 2001 book, IBM and the Holocaust, Black began to put together what would ultimately become a team of more than 100 researchers, translators, and assistants to work on discovery and analysis of primary source documents written in German, French, and Polish. In all, more than 20,000 documents from some 50 different libraries, archives, museums, and other collections were assembled and analyzed in the writing of the book.

In 2006, Black wrote an article on Iran and the Holocaust, claiming that there was an "Iran-Nazi alliance" during World War Two, that Reza Shah was inspired to rename his country from Persia to Iran by Nazi agents, and that "Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides" because Jewish refugees passing through Iran had to pay exorbitant fees. The article was criticized by the Iranian historian Abbas Milani, who instead argued that Iran did not charge any money at all, that Nazi agents had no role in Reza Shah's renaming decision, and that there was no Iran-Nazi alliance.

In the fall of 2012, it was reported that Plan B, the production company owned by actor Brad Pitt, had taken an option on a cinematic adaptation of Black's IBM and the Holocaust. Marcus Hinchey, co-writer of the 2010 film All Good Things, was tapped for script-writing responsibilities. Black has written on topics beyond that of 1933–1945 German history, including books on the issue of oil dependence, the history of Iraq, and alternative energy. He is presently a syndicated columnist in publications in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. Black has also occasionally written on the subject of film and television music, contributing opinion pieces and composer interviews to various print and online publications. An aficionado of musical soundtracks, Black regularly credits specific works which have provided "musical inspiration that propelled the writing" in the introductory notes to each book.