Herman Bernstein (Yiddish: הערמאַן בערנשטײן, September 21, 1876 – August 31, 1935) was an American journalist, poet, novelist, playwright, translator, Jewish activist, and diplomat.

[1] Bernstein covered the Russian Revolution in 1917 for the New York Herald, which led him to both Siberia and Japan with the American Expeditionary Forces.

In the 1920s Bernstein wrote for the New York American and the Brooklyn Eagle, often reporting from Europe and writing frequently about Russia.

Bernstein summarized the contents as follows: He remarked that "the Kaiser is exposed as a master intriguer and Mephistophelian plotter for German domination of the world.

Bernstein interviewed many of the most eminent people of his time, including Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Auguste Rodin, Henri Bergson, Pope Benedict XV, Peter Kropotkin, Arthur Schnitzler, Leon Trotsky, Chaim Weizmann, Havelock Ellis, Romain Rolland, Albert Einstein, and Woodrow Wilson.

[8] Bernstein translated a number of important literary works, by figures such as Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev, from Russian to English.

In the early 1910s, Bernstein advocated liberal immigration policies and was a member of the Democratic National Committee, working to elect Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

[6] In 1921, responding to Henry Ford's printing of 500,000 copies of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as a series of anti-Semitic articles under the title The International Jew in Ford's newspaper The Dearborn Independent, Bernstein published the book History of a Lie,[15] a demonstration of The Protocols' spurious origins.

"He told me most of the things that I have printed," Ford claimed in the article, which labeled Bernstein "the messenger boy of international Jewry.

He told the press that he was doing a public service by allowing the American people to get a "true picture" of Ford's "diseased imagination.

In response to the suits, as well as the fear that the negative publicity was hurting automobile sales, Ford issued an 'Apology to Jews,' the sincerity of which is a matter of controversy.

[21] In 1935, the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany and revived The Protocols yet again - and requiring all German schoolchildren to read it.

Herman Bernstein's correspondence, housed at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History in New York,[23] includes letters to and from many of the most eminent people of that period in various walks of life, including Mark Twain Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem, Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.