Bret Louis Stephens (born November 21, 1973) is an American conservative journalist, editor, and columnist. He began working as an opinion columnist for The New York Times in April 2017 and as a senior contributor to NBC News in June 2017. Stephens previously worked for The Wall Street Journal as a foreign-affairs columnist and later as the deputy editorial page editor, and was responsible for the editorial pages of its European and Asian editions. From 2002 to 2004, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2013. Stephens is known for his neoconservative foreign policy opinions and for being part of the right-of-center opposition to Donald Trump. Biography Stephens was born in New York City, the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico. Both his parents were secular Jews. His mother was born in Italy at the start of World War II to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany. His paternal grandfather, Louis Ehrlich, was born in 1901 in Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova). He fled with his family to New York after the Kishinev pogrom and changed the family surname to Stephens (after poet James Stephens). Louis Stephens moved to Mexico City, where he founded General Products and built his fortune. He married Annette Margolis and had two sons, Charles and Luis. Charles married Xenia. They moved to Mexico City with their newborn son, Bret, to help run the chemical company, inherited from Louis. Bret was raised there and is fluent in Spanish. As a teenager, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. Stephens earned an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He then earned a master's degree in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He is married to Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, a New York Times music critic. They have three children, and live in New York City. He was previously married to Pamela Paul, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review. Journalism career Stephens began his career as an assistant editor at Commentary magazine in 1995–96. In 1998 he joined The Wall Street Journal as an op-ed editor. He later worked as an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, in Brussels. Stephens edited the weekly "State of the Union" column on the European Union. In