About Edwin Black
Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling international investigative author of 215 award-winning editions in 20 languages in 190 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe, and Israel. Since 2020, he has hosted the weekly issues-oriented and history-based podcast, The Edwin Black Show, along with its companion YouTube channel, which hosts edited and visually documented episodes plus trailers and bonus features.
With more than 2.2 million books in print, for a half century, his work has focused on human rights, genocide, organized hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropic abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy, and historical investigation. Editors have submitted Black’s work fourteen times for Pulitzer Prize nominations, and, in recent years, he has been the recipient of a series of top editorial awards and nominations. He has also contributed to a number of noted anthologies worldwide. For his human rights investigations, Black has been interviewed on hundreds of network broadcasts from Oprah, the Today Show, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, and NBC’s Dateline in the US, to the leading networks of Europe, Latin America, and Israel.
His human rights works have been the subject of numerous documentaries, here and abroad. Several of his books have been optioned by Hollywood for film, with one in active pre-production. Black’s speaking tours include hundreds of events each year at prestigious venues. In the US, he has lectured broadly, from the Library of Congress to Harvard University, and from the United Nations to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. In Europe, he has lectured at top venues, from London’s British War Museum and Amsterdam’s Institute for War Documentation to Munich’s Carl Orff Hall. He has appeared to speak, lecture, or testify on a variety of social justice and historical issues numerous times in various legislatures such as the US House of Representatives, North Carolina’s General Assembly, the European Parliament, the Australian Parliament, the Canadian House of Commons, and Israel's Knesset.
Black’s eleven award-winning and bestselling books are IBM and the Holocaust, War Against the Weak, The Farhud, Nazi Nexus, The Plan, Internal Combustion, Banking on Baghdad, Financing the Flames, British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement, The Transfer Agreement, and a novel, Format C:. His enterprise and investigative writings have appeared in scores of newspapers from the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to the Chicago Tribune and the Sunday Times of London, Frankfurter Zeitung, and the Jerusalem Post, as well as scores of magazines as diverse as Der Spiegel, L’Express, Business Week, and the American Bar Association Journal. Black’s articles are syndicated worldwide by Feature Group News Service, JNS, and other sub-syndicates.
In 2024, Black became the first appointed scholar-in-residence and historian for the International March of the Living at Auschwitz, officiating for all delegations and ceremonies. Earlier that year, Yad Vashem and the Museum of Tolerance sponsored a momentous four event series in Mexico City. Yad Vashem bestowed upon Black a special service award for lifetime achievement. In addition, he delivered the inaugural lecture at Towson University’s Berman Center for Humanity, Tolerance & Holocaust Education.
In 2023, Black’s lecture on IBM and the Holocaust opened the Furman University exhibit Americans and the Holocaust, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association.
In 2020, during the COVID crisis, Black launched his highly-lauded weekly podcast The Edwin Black Show and its companion YouTube Channel, delving deeply into such as topics as genocide, historical inequities, Israel, antisemitism, and other human rights issues. During its several seasons, many prominent guests have regularly appeared on Black’s show, which enjoys tens of thousands of views.
During 2018 and 2019, Black appeared at scores of prestigious universities, museums, and synagogues in America and abroad. This included organizing and leading the main Kristallnacht 80th Anniversary ceremonies in New York City, which was attended by leading Jewish leaders and academicians.
In 2017, Black undertook a 14-event global series across the United States and Australia, ignited an international campaign to replace the United Nations with his ideal for a replacement organization he called the Covenant of Democratic Nations. That same year, 2017, he led a 13-city series across America on the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.
In 2016, Black organized a whirlwind 70th Anniversary Farhud commemoration starting in the House of Representatives in Washington DC, moving to New York, then London and then Jerusalem’s Knesset—all within 5 days. International Farhud Day was conceived by Black to commemorate the Arab-Nazi riot of June 1 1941 in Baghdad, this based on his book The Farhud. The series of public events followed his June 1, 2015 proclamation, of International Farhud Day at UN Headquarters in a live global UN event, also driven by revelations in The Farhud.
In 2014, in his bestseller Financing the Flames, Black exposed massive irregularities in taxpayer-enabled NGOs in Israel, including the New Israel Fund. In that book Black journalistically revealed for the first time the existence of Palestinian Authority reward salaries for convicted terrorists , with the level of compensation increasing upward based on the severity and number of victims resulting from their crime. This revelation became known as “Pay to Slay.” He appeared before several national legislatures to detail his findings. In February and early March 2014, Black appeared before four parliaments in four weeks: The British House of Commons in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, and finally before the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, DC.
Also, in November and December 2014, Black embarked upon on a 45-event Human Rights Tour. In North Carolina, Black appeared nine times in three days, speaking out against the persecution of Yazidis, Shi’a Muslims, and Christians in Iraq; racial injustice in America and its impact on elections; environmental injustice arising out of oil addiction; journalistic ethics in covering human rights; bias against Jews in Israel; and a health care crisis in the Middle East.
From 2013 and 2011, Black was featured at hundreds of scholar-in-residence programs in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Israel. Black was featured at scores of speaking events in the United States and overseas, highlighting all his published works. His tour appearances included one before the European Parliament in Brussels about IBM and the Holocaust and modern-day privacy concerns—an issue that continues to raise concerns. That year, special expanded editions of both IBM and the Holocaust and War Against the Weak were published. During that period, Black continued to be featured at hundreds of scholar-in-residence programs in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Israel.
In 2011, Black was featured at a four-week scholar-in-residence in Australia sponsored by the Shalom Institute ad focusing on his work in petropolitics (a term that Black coined) and Holocaust history. He was also asked to deliver a week-long 5-campus scholar-in-residence in North Carolina sponsored by an official coalition of that state’s universities, legislators, civic institutions, and other leadership groups, exploring the dark side of eugenics, this arising from his bestseller War Against the Weak. The North Carolina tour was marked by numerous standing-room only appearances. Black's work helped spearhead the successful crusade for eugenic reparations paid by the state of North Carolina. That year, 2011 Black received four service awards: from Moriah College in Sydney for his work in Nazi Nexus, from the Jewish War Veterans for his work in the book The Transfer Agreement, from Hadassah Ahavat Yisrael for his work in the book The Farhud, and the North Carolina Central University (an HBCU) Drum Major for Justice for lifetime achievement.
In 2010, the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), in a Congressional ceremony, bestowed its coveted Justice for All on Black for his work on eugenics and his book War Against the Weak. In 2008, the American Jewish Press Association gave Black its Rockower Award for best investigative article of the year, for the series “Hitler’s Carmaker,” syndicated internationally by the JTA.
In 2007, Black’s bestselling book Internal Combustion was honored with four major editorial awards: Best Book of the Year from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a Rockower Award for Best Investigation of the Year from the American Jewish Press Association, a Green Globe, and the Thomas Edison Award. That same year, the American Jewish Congress presented Black with its Integrity Award for lifetime achievement.
In 2005, Black won the World Affairs Council’s award for the Best World Affairs Book for Banking on Baghdad, and also the Doña Gracia Medal for Best Book of The Year. In 2004, he won the coveted Rockower First Prize for Investigative Journalism from the American Jewish Press Association for “Funding Hate,” his acclaimed syndicated investigation of the Ford Foundation’s systematic funding of hate groups.
In 2003, he received the top two editorial awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors: Best Book of the Year for IBM and the Holocaust and Best Article of the Year for “IBM in Auschwitz,” published in the Village Voice. Also in 2003, Black received the International Human Rights Award from the World Affairs Council for War Against the Weak. Before that, Black received the Chicago Public Library's Carl Sandburg Award for The Transfer Agreement, as well as two Folio Awards and a Computer Press Association Award for excellence in magazine publishing. The author has received two honors for moral leadership: the Moral Courage Award from a consortium of human rights organizations and agencies led by San Diego State University, and the Moral Compass Award from the Southwest Florida Holocaust Museum in Naples.