His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he saw as expanding exponentially.
Rubinstein was born in New York City, and educated at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University in the United States.
[3] Following in the footsteps of such archetypal Anglo-Jewish figures as Lucien Wolf, Israel Zangwill and Cecil Roth, he was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England from 2002 to 2004.
Rubinstein has appeared in several historical documentaries on the Holocaust, including the BBC's Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz, which premiered in the United States on the PBS network in January 2020.
Calling him "a towering figure" an obituary in the Australian Jewish News noted that "Beyond academia, Rubinstein was a powerful voice in public discourse.
His Shadow Pasts (2007) examines such topics as the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack the Ripper, and the Shakespeare authorship question.