Edward Rothstein

Edward Benjamin Rothstein (born October 16, 1952) is an American critic. Rothstein wrote music criticism early in his career, but is best known for his critical analysis of museums and museum exhibitions.

Rothstein holds a B.A. from Yale University (1973), an M.A. in English literature from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (1994). In addition, Rothstein did graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis University. He was at The New York Times for a long time, but he took a buyout (a cash payout offered to employees, with compensation based on a sliding scale of the number of years they spent working for the employer^[1]) from the newspaper and joined The Wall Street Journal. He wrote in 2020 that "At The New York Times, freedom of speech gave way to group pressure, and debate turned into intimidation".^[2]

Rothstein was the cultural critic-at-large for The New York Times,^[3] particularly examining the reach and depth of museums, large and small, one by one. He has worked as a music critic for The New Republic and as the chief music critic for the Times. He worked briefly as an editor at Macmillan's Free Press in the mid-1980s. Rothstein is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991.