Richard C. Schneider
An award-winning journalist and documentary film-maker, Richard C. Schneider is editor-at-large for ARD German Television, as well as a writer, and a lecturer at several universities. He currently shares his time between Israel and Germany, and his main areas of expertise are the Middle East and Europe.
He spent a decade as bureau chief of the ARD studio in Tel Aviv (2005 – 2015), where he was responsible for covering Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Cyprus. He subsequently became bureau chief for ARD in Rome (2016/17) where he covered Italy, Greece, Malta and the Vatican.
Since 2017, he has been editor-at-large for ARD, which enables him to satisfy his passion for in depth reporting, by making long-format documentaries and reports on political topics worldwide.
The Filmmaker
Over the course of his career, he has thus authored and directed several hundred documentaries and reports, in the Middle East, Europe, the USA and elsewhere, for which he has received numerous awards. His four-part series called “Here We Are! Jews in Germany from 1945-2000” received great critical acclaim and made him well known to a wide audience in Germany and beyond.
He has also worked for several ARD subsidiaries, including for BR, WDR, NDR (all belong ARD) and other German broadcasters. In this capacity, in the late 1990s.
Having been a live news reporter, a radio broadcaster, a bureau chief and a film-maker, Schneider masters all of the common television formats, and has extensive experience in public speaking.
The Author
He currently devotes a significant part of his time to writing, and is a regular contributor to DIE ZEIT, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Profil (Vienna), for the Jerusalem Report and Haaretz (Tel Aviv), as well as other national and international magazines.
The Teacher
He holds several teaching assignments in the field of journalism and Middle Eastern studies, namely at the University of Basel, the LUISS University in Rome and the German School of Journalism in Munich.
The author of eight books, he is now working on a manuscript about Anti-Semitism and the decline of Liberalism in Europe.
The main topics of his work are the Middle East conflict, Israeli history and politics, the Third Reich and its reappraisal, right-wing radicalism, terrorism, European-American relations (especially German-American relations), global politics in relation to the Middle East, anti-Semitism. He is also well-versed in Hungarian politics. In addition, Richard C. Schneider is focusing presently on these specific topics:
• The end of liberal democracies. Dangers and threats from right-wing populism, left-wing extremism, jihadism and the digital revolution.
• The problematic future of the Jews in Europe
• The Israel-Iran conflict
• Questions about the future of journalism in a changing technological era.
From Theatre to Journalism
He began his career as assistant director at the Bavarian National Theater, at the Kammerspiele in Munich and at the Schauspielhaus Bonn, where he worked with directors such as George Tabori, Peter Palitzsch, Helmut Baumann, Andras Fricsay and Peter Zadek. Later he worked as a director himself and was manager of the Musical School of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, Austria.
He holds a Masters Degree in German Literature, Drama and Art History from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich.
Fluent in German, English, French, and Hebrew, he is also proficient in Italian, Hungarian, Dutch and Yiddish.