18 Facts About Edwin Black

Edwin Black 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.

Edwin Black started working as a professional journalist while still in high school, later attending university where he further developed the craft.

Edwin Black 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.

Edwin Black was tasked with finding out about an alleged plot to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago on November 2,1963.

For Edwin Black it was a long and difficult assignment that finally resulted in his November 1975 article in Chicago Independent magazine.

Edwin Black noted in the article how he became the subject of government harassment.

In 1978, Edwin 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, Edwin 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.

Edwin 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, Edwin 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 2006, Edwin 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.

Edwin Black is presently a syndicated columnist in publications in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere.

Edwin Black has occasionally written on the subject of film and television music, contributing opinion pieces and composer interviews to various print and online publications.

In 2015, Edwin Black founded the annual commemoration, International Farhud Day, which he proclaimed at the United Nations in a live globally-streamed event in 2015.

Edwin Black originated the Yom HaGirush commemoration, November 30, commemorating the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries after the State of Israel was declared its independence, in a broadcast of the Edwin Black Show in 2021.

In February and March 2014, Edwin Black embarked upon a "Parliamentary Tour" in which he appeared at four parliaments in a four-week period, including the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, the Knesset in Jerusalem, and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives in Washington DC.

In November and December 2014, Edwin Black went on a 45-event "Human Rights Tour".

From May 31 to June 3,2016, Edwin Black embarked upon a 100-hour, four-city, three-country commemoration book tour to observe International Farhud Day on the 75th anniversary of the Farhud.