His father, Sytze Leonard "Leo" Buruma, was a Dutch lawyer and son of a Mennonite minister; his mother, Gwendolyn Margaret "Wendy" Schlesinger, was a Briton of German-Jewish descent.

He subsequently pursued postgraduate studies in Japanese cinema from 1975 to 1977 at the College of Art (Nichidai Geijutsu Gakko) of the Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan.

[6] He held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1991) and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. (1999), and he was an Alistair Horne fellow of St Antony's College in Oxford, United Kingdom.

[9] In September 2018, Buruma left the NYRB position following a dispute about his publication of an essay by Canadian talk show host Jian Ghomeshi.

[citation needed] He denied that the article was misleading because it had failed to mention that Ghomeshi had been required to issue an apology to one of the victims as part of the terms of a case against him.

[15] More than 100 contributors to the Review, including Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan, signed a letter of protest to express fears that Buruma's exit threatened intellectual culture and "the free exploration of ideas".

[25] He argued in 2001 for wholehearted British participation in the European Union because they were the "strongest champions in Europe of a liberal approach to commerce and politics".