Josef Joffe

About

Josef Joffe is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and was publisher/editor of the German weekly Die Zeit from 2000 to 2023.

His areas of interest are US foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, Europe and Germany, and the Middle East.

His essays and reviews have appeared in Commentary, Financial Times, Free Press, New Republic, New York Review of Books, New York Times (magazine and newspaper), Newsweek, Time, Times Literary Supplement, UnHerd, Wall Prospect (London), Wall Street Journal, Washington Beacon, and Weekly Standard.

His second career has been in academia. A professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford, he was also a senior fellow at Stanford's Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. He was a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins (School of Advanced International Studies) in 1982–84. He has also taught at Harvard, and most recently at SAIS in Washington and Bologna. His first teaching job was at the University of Munich and the Salzburg Seminar.

His scholarly work has appeared in The American Interest, The American Political Science Review, The American Purpose, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, and National Interest.  He is the author of The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies (Liveright, 2013), Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (W.W. Norton, 2007), The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States, and the Burdens of Alliance (Ballinger Pub Co, 1987), coauthor of Eroding Empire: Western Relations with Eastern Europe (Brookings Institution Press, 1987), plus various books in German like Der gute Deutsche: Die Karriere einer moralischen Supermacht.

Joffe holds various board positions for the American Academy, Berlin (founding member); Aspen Institute, Berlin; Leo Baeck Institute, New York; Abraham Geiger College (founding chairman); and International Security, Harvard University. He also founded the American Interest (Washington, DC) with Zibigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, and Francis Fukuyama.

Among his awards are honorary doctoral degrees from Lewis and Clark College in 2005 and Swarthmore College in 2002, Theodor Wolff Prize (journalism), Ludwig Börne Prize (essays/literature), Scopus Award of the Hebrew University, and the Federal Order of Merit.

Raised in Berlin, Joffe obtained his PhD in government from Harvard and his MA from Johns Hopkins.