His mother was born in Italy at the start of World War II to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany.

They moved to Mexico City with their newborn son, Bret, to help run the chemical company, inherited from Louis.

Haaretz reported at the time that the appointment of Stephens, a non-Israeli, triggered some unease among senior Jerusalem Post management and staff.

[16] Stephens said that one of the reasons he left The Wall Street Journal for The Jerusalem Post was that he believed that Western media was getting Israel's story wrong.

"[17] Stephens led The Jerusalem Post during the worst years of the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombings against Israel and pointed the paper in a more neoconservative direction.

In 2017, Stephens left the Journal, joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist,[19] and began appearing as an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

[15] Stephens won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for "his incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist.

[27] The Real-Time Academy judges contestants for the Shorty Awards, which honor the best individuals and organizations on social media.

[29] In 2017, Stephens chaired the jury that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing to Art Cullen of The Storm Lake Times.

[34][35][36] The controversy gained massive attention online, leading to then-president Donald Trump tweeting, "lightweight journalist Bret Stephens, a Conservative who does anything that his bosses at the paper tell him to do!

[40] In a December 2019 column titled "The Secrets of Jewish Genius",[41] in which he contended that Ashkenazi Jews have a history of alternative thinking which has led them to be successful.

"[42][43] Following widespread criticism, The New York Times editors deleted the section of the column in which he appeared to claim that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically superior to other groups.

[44] The editors said that Stephens erred in citing an academic study by an author with "racist views" whose 2005 paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.

[44][45] The Times's deletion was criticized by Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen, and Steven Pinker, who called it "surrender to an outrage mob".

[24] Critics have characterized his foreign policy opinions as neoconservative, part of a right-wing political movement associated with President George W. Bush that advocates the use of military force abroad, particularly in the Middle East, as a way of promoting democracy there.

[53] Although the weapons of mass destruction used as a casus belli were never shown to exist, Stephens continued to insist as late as 2013 that the Bush administration had "solid evidence" for going to war.

[60][61] Stephens considers climate change a "20-year-old mass hysteria phenomenon" and rejects the notion that greenhouse-gas emissions are an environmental threat.

[64] Stephens claims that global warming activism is based on theological beliefs, rather than science, as an outgrowth of Western tendencies to expect punishment for sins.

[57][65] Stephens's positions on this issue led to a protest in 2013 over his Pulitzer citation omitting his climate change columns,[62] and to a strong backlash against his 2017 hiring by The New York Times.