Claudia Dreifus

Bio

When asked how this eminent interviewer and journalist got started in journalism, one is surprised to hear Claudia Dreifus' s answer. She studied playwriting at New York University in the 1960s but by the time she graduated with a degree in Dramatic Arts, she knew she wanted to be a journalist. Interviewing is “learning people's stories and creating little plays about them.” Dreifus plays the minor role and her interviewee is the major character.

In her long career, she has interviewed and written about some of the world's most important and influential people. The extensive list includes the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Esther Dyson, Dan Rather, Richard Dreyfuss, Colin Powell, Benazir Bhutto, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Isabel Allende, Gloria Steinem, Julian Bond and Jane Goodall. Dreifus likes to “ferret through their lives” for a couple of months, then meet and ask questions that will reveal as much of their lives as she can unwrap. Dan Rather said, “Being interviewed by Claudia Dreifus is like playing tennis with Steffi Graf: do your best, and you'll learn a lot; anything less, and she'll pave the court with you.”

Dreifus comes from a long line of interesting women. She was raised in New York by her grandmother, a woman whose life, she believes, was an example for her own independence and the drive to work hard and succeed. Born in the 1880s in a small village in East Prussia, her grandmother left home at 14 to work in the city of Breslau to earn enough money to support her Sephardic Jewish family. Moving later to Berlin, she opened and ran millinery shops. Unusual for her time, she married, had children and still worked throughout her life. In 1939, after years of trying, she acquired a visa and immigrated to the United States on one of the last boats to get out of Germany. Her sisters and cousins were not so lucky.

Claudia Dreifus, born in New York in 1944, heard the stories her grandmother had lived through - the rise of Hitler, how she lost everything and how Hitler slaughtered her family in 1942. From this, her grandmother taught her to think of community in a more expansive way, that hate must be opposed by knowledge, kindness, universality and respect.

For ten years she worked for Newsday's Sunday Magazine as the “L.I. Interviewer.” In the late 70s and throughout the 80s she worked for Playboy, polishing her skills by interviewing Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, William Safire and then Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. She moved to The New York Times in the 1990s, continuing her interviews with celebrities from the political and cultural world. When the political world soured for her, she was invited by Cornelia Dean, The Times Science Editor, to try her hand in this department. She accepted and found herself the only “math flunkee of Wingate High School interviewing people with three Ph.D.'s.”

She is still producing spectacular interviews of people in science. From Nobel Laureates to little-known innovators across many science disciplines, she converses with people who devote their lives to making things better. “There is,” she says, “phenomenal potential for good, for solving diseases like Alzheimer's, cancers and some forms of paralyses.” Scientist Marie Philbin, of Northern Ireland, has solved some of the problems of why nerves don't regenerate. Jane Goodall, she believes, revolutionized science by investigating animals like an anthropologist would study people, discovering that chimps have cultural and social societies. Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley states: “There is no format that makes science and scientists more digestible than a 'conversation' with an intelligent interlocutor who is intrigued with the subject. And there are few journalists who are able to get scientists talking about their work with more lucidity than Claudia Dreifus.”

Among her published books are Interview, Seven Stories Press, 1999; Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science from the New York Times, 2001; The Criminal Justice System and Women, 1982 (for which she received an investigative journalism grant from Gloria Steinem); Seizing Our Bodies: The Politics of Women's Health, 1978; and Radical Lifestyles, 1970. She is also a contributing journalist to The New York Times Magazine, Town and Country, Playboy, Ms. Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and the Evergreen Review Reader.

She has received numerous awards for her writing, among them the “1987 Outstanding Magazine Article Award” from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the 1987 American Jewish Press Association's Simon Rockower Award for Distinguished Commentary; and the 1980 Special Award for Service to Women from the YWCA of New York. She is also a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School University.

With her writing skills, her knowledge and her insatiable curiosity, Claudia Dreifus continues to make science tangible, accessible and entertaining.

Appearances on CUNY TV

Jewish Women in America

Keeping Relevant With Ronnie Eldridge