Don David Guttenplan is the editor and former London correspondent of The Nation and author of The Holocaust on Trial, a book about the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt libel case.
During the 1980s he worked in New York Citypolitics and in publishing, where his proudest achievements were drafting the bill to name a portion of Central Park "Strawberry Fields", commissioning of a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman, and the reissue of the WPA Guide to New York City. He was also briefly lead singer for the extremely obscure punk band The Editors, though their paying gigs all came after he left the group to study in Britain. However, the experience was invaluable background for writing pop music reviews in Vanity Fair. After working as a senior editor at the Village Voice, editing the paper's political and news coverage and writing a cover story exposing the corrupt politics behind the proposed redevelopment of Times Square, his enthusiasm for lost causes led him to New York Newsday, where he wrote a weekly media column and covered the 1988 presidential campaign. His reporting on the 1990 Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx won a Page One award from the New York Newspaper Guild and his investigative reporting on New York City's ineffectual fire code was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Following a year as a research fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies centre at Columbia, Guttenplan moved to London in 1994. He has taught American History at University College and at Birkbeck College, and is a frequent commentator on American culture and politics on the BBC. In 2001 Guttenplan's interest in the use of the British libel laws to silence criticism led him to write about the suit brought by British author David Irving, who claimed no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, against American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who had called Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." Guttenplan's account of the case, The Holocaust on Trial, was described by Ian Buruma in The New Yorker as "a mixture of superb reportage and serious reflection—about the role of Jewish identity politics in the United States, antisemitism in Britain, the historiography of the Cold War, and so on." Neal Ascherson wrote: “Guttenplan sat through every day of the trial, and no wiser, more honest, or more melancholy book will ever be written about it.” The Holocaust on Trial has been translated into German, Italian and Swedish. When his friend and former teacher Edward Said became too ill to continue lecturing, Guttenplan arranged to film a series of lengthy conversations which, after Said died in 2003, became Edward Said: The Last Interview. The British journal Sight and Sound described the film as "the kind of portrait of an intellectual which is very rare," while the Times called it "enthralling, touching, melancholic and fierce." The New York Times pronounced it "riveting," adding "Edward Said: The Last Interview proves that a couch, a camera and a great mind can be all the inspiration a filmmaker needs.” The 120-minute documentary was freely available as of 2012 but not available as of 2017. In June 2009, Guttenplan completed a biography of I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Guttenplan replaced Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel as Editor of The Nation on June 15, 2019.
Personal life
Guttenplanten lives in north London with his wife, Maria Margaronis and three children, Alexander Guttenplan, Zoe, and Theo. His son Alexander was the captain of Emmanuel College, Cambridge's 2010 winning University Challenge team.
