Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish family in New York City, New York and grew up in Bay Shore, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1968 and won a Carnegie Fellowship to attend Yale's graduate program in English Literature, though he dropped out after taking one course. He was an editor of The Fire Island News and then wrote for The Village Voice for several years, leaving in 1975 after which he wrote for Esquire, Harper's, High Times, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine and Slate. Rosenbaum spent more than ten years doing research on Adolf Hitler including travels to Vienna, Munich, London, Paris, and Jerusalem, interviewing leading historians, philosophers, biographers, theologians and psychologists. Some of those interviewed by Rosenbaum included Daniel Goldhagen, David Irving, Rudolph Binion, Claude Lanzmann, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Christopher Browning, George Steiner, and Yehuda Bauer. The result was his 1998 book, . In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum also recounted in detail the previously little-reported story of the efforts of anti-Hitler journalists at the Munich Post who, from 1920 to 1933, published repeated exposés on the criminal activities of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Matthew Ricketson, coordinator of the Journalism program at RMIT University's School of Applied Communication in Melbourne, Australia, called this book "a brilliant piece of research". In 1987 he began writing a weekly column for the New York Observer called "The Edgy Enthusiast". He currently writes a column for Slate called The Spectator. In The Shakespeare Wars he discussed recent controversies among literary historians, actors, and directors over how the works of William Shakespeare should be read, understood, and produced. His most recent book is How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, which discusses the paradoxes of deterrence, the danger of nuclear proliferation, and whether the bomb comprises an "exceptionalist" argument about warfare and genocide. In December 2015 Rosenbaum published the article "Thinking the Unthinkable," in which he expresses his view that there exists a frightening possibility that Israel might not survive as a nation. In it he claims that 'The Palestinians want a Hitlerite Judenrein state, however much violence it takes to accomplish it. Not separation, elimination.' The Palestinians are, he asserts, engaged in incessant state and religious incitement to murder Jews. The 'stabbing intifada' is not an insurgency, but a matter of 'the ritual murder of Jews'. Whereas Hitler tried to hide his crimes, the Palestinians celebrate killing Jews.
Books
The Secret Parts of Fortune
How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III
