Rosenbaum began his career as an editor of
The Fire Island News and then wrote for
The Village Voice for several years, leaving in 1975 after which he wrote for
Esquire, ''
Harper's, High Times, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, and Slate''. Rosenbaum spent more than ten years doing research on
Adolf Hitler including travels to
Vienna,
Munich,
London,
Paris, and
Jerusalem, interviewing leading
historians,
philosophers,
biographers,
theologians and
psychologists. Some of those interviewed by Rosenbaum included
Daniel Goldhagen,
David Irving, Rudolph Binion,
Claude Lanzmann,
Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Alan Bullock,
Christopher Browning,
George Steiner, and
Yehuda Bauer. The result was his 1998 book,
Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. In
Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum also recounted in detail the previously little-reported story of the efforts of anti-Hitler journalists at the
Munich Post who, from 1920 to 1933, published repeated exposés on the criminal activities of the
National Socialist German Workers Party (i.e. the Nazis). Matthew Ricketson, coordinator of the Journalism program at
RMIT University's School of Applied Communication in
Melbourne, Australia, called this book "a brilliant piece of research". In 1987, he began writing a weekly column for the
New York Observer called "The Edgy Enthusiast". He wrote a column for
Slate called "The Spectator"; as of 2024, its last post was in 2016. In 2009, one of Rosenbaum's Spectator columns was a lengthy sardonic critique of pop music icon
Billy Joel entitled "The Worst Pop Singer Ever." In
The Shakespeare Wars, he wrote about recent controversies among literary historians, actors, and directors over how the works of
William Shakespeare should be read, understood, and produced. His book
How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III (2011), addresses the paradoxes of deterrence, the danger of nuclear proliferation, and whether the bomb comprises an argument about warfare and genocide. In December 2015, Rosenbaum published the article "Thinking the Unthinkable", in which he expresses his view that there exists a frightening possibility that
Israel might not survive as a nation. In it, he writes that, "The Palestinians want a Hitlerite Judenrein state, however much violence it takes to accomplish it. Not separation, elimination." The Palestinians are, he asserts, engaged in incessant state and religious incitement to murder Jews. The "stabbing intifada" is not an insurgency, but a matter of "the ritual murder of Jews". Whereas Hitler tried to hide his crimes, the Palestinians celebrate killing Jews. ==Bibliography==